Mark Zuckerberg
Appearances
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I didn't know. So, yeah, so, I mean, the glasses, though, you know, we thought that this was like, all right, we want to get working with Estee Lauder Luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. And then, you know, they're really good. They look good. And then AI, like, the massive transformation in AI.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like full-scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. So now it's like, all right, great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers. You can talk to it.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group that's running it, and I'm like, Hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that Meta AI is the primary feature of it. And then, like, I remember I came in the next week and they built a prototype of it on Tuesday. And it was like, all right, good. Yeah, no, this is good.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. So we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person no matter where they actually physically are is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. But it depends on how you define what you are. And then you need to figure out well, how do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in. Because a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this kind of one thing. And the reason why we can build all these things is because we have a really strong technology foundation. And some of that is just... me and how I think about stuff.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I was an engineer before I got started. I mean, I mostly took systems engineering type classes when I was in college. So you talk about Friendster and Myspace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, do you know this person? Should you show them their page?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So I think it's a combination of... a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. So you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and built a good organization around. And it's one of the things that I... observed as soon as I came out to the Valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The companies I was talking about, it's like, The CEO wasn't technical.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical, and everyone else wasn't. It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually want...
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
like a lot of the people on our management team, it's like, you know, split, it's mostly people running either these big product groups who've come up through different technical pathways at the company. And I think that there's like a balance, right? It's like, you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board. And I think it just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental, right?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It's like we're able to kind of go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. And for that, I think, we also, I think, are a pretty curious and learning-focused organization where
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
You know, I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing and more as how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible how to make each thing better for the people we're trying to serve. So I define our strategy as we can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get a bunch of feedback. We're going to learn what people like better than other people.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And then over time, by the time you get to, whether it's version 3 or 4 or 5, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently. It's you just... you learn faster. So that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world, and iterate as quickly as you can.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But you're very generous. Part of it is like, okay, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that, but there's a certain, personality that goes with taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways, we're the opposite of Apple. And clearly, their stuff has worked really well, too. But they take this approach. It's like, we're going to take a long time. We're going to polish it. We're going to put it out.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out. Because it's obviously not in the sense that it's like you want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
you obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses. So if it's so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. That doesn't work. But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, OK, well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for another couple of months or whatever.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I do just think that you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Because I think if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you were going to ship.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand, but... Well, but innately it is.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, I don't want to overstate it. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take... We want to make sure that we're shipping things that... that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're gonna be most used for.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Like I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually, you know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things. It is actually less clear what are gonna be the initial use cases for a lot of these things that are super valuable.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And so, okay, part of it is like, okay, you put something out, you wanna kind of collect feedback and what people are actually, what it's, you know, where it's resonating. If what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people aren't going to use it for anything because it sucks.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for, and they're not all going to be right, and you want to kind of go early enough on that as more, yeah.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world and trying to build something that's aligned with that while trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers. So I think both probably matter, yeah.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I mean, I think that there's... There's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, in 2006, when we built the first version of News Feed, before that, social networks were basically profiles. And then we were like, hey, people actually kind of want to get the updates, and let's show them that. And if we rank them, then we can.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
There's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today, it's hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that, obviously, some of these things are sort of seminal. I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we basically established first.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And then some of them are ones that other people did where we take pride in learning from what is working in the world. You know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people like discovered that were good first. And then we build a better version of it. And I mean, I think that that's, You know, no one company is going to invent everything, right?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to kind of be a successful company. But I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So yeah, I mean, we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source. I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since like, I don't know, the late 1990s or something. For us, open source has been important and valuable.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, yeah. No, and it's great. It makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship with this because sequentially as a company, we came after Google. So Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
They were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. But we built it, and then we're like, OK, not an advantage for us, because Google already has that. So we might as well just make it open. And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for, any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology. But what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were get it to become the industry standard. So now you have all these other cloud service platforms that basically use Open Compute.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And because of that, the supply chain is standardized around our designs, which means that it's way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars. And the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So all right, that's like a win-win. I think in order for this to work, we do a lot of open source stuff. We do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think open source is very valuable, but I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I mean, around Lama.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, it's... You know, similar deal. You know, we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model, right? I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years, I don't think that, you know, for us, it's like we've just been... We've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And we're a big enough company at this point that we don't have to. We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that. But these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic. They're ecosystems. They get better when other people use them. So for us...
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
There's a huge amount of good, and it philosophically lines up with where we are. I mean, look, I definitely firsthand have a lot of experiences. We were trying to build stuff on mobile platforms. The platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that. That's frustrating.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think it was a pretty different technical issue. So, I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites, and we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it, and it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now all of a sudden this, like, app model comes along, and it's like we have to build, like, different ones for each phone.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And you have to go through approval to get it shipped. And we have to wait weeks before it can ship. It's like, this sucks. So we're like, all right, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get a web-based platform. So you basically build a native shell. And you build this web-based platform in it. And we'll be able to just update our apps every day. And we'll ship one thing once.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone. Blackberry and Windows Mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And we're like, basically, whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing, we're going to make up for in velocity and by having way more of our energy focused on one platform. Well, we were wrong.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It turned out that having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good. So we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch. And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any revenue. Because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
On desktop, you basically have the app, and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile, we needed to figure out, what does it mean to put ads into the experience?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, and advertisers have specific formats that they like working with, and the idea that we were just going to be like, all right, now your ad is going to look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And the idea that now for people, you were going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product, and now we're just going to start putting ads in it was a challenge for the people using the product. We needed to figure that out, and we needed to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
We were just like, look, we're going to pause feature development of the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite. If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and all these things that they tried to do a rewrite. They needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also tried to add features. They basically just never terminated.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So that's a real risk when you're completely changing your underlying platform that you're going to miss it. I was like, all right, we've got to minimize the chance that that happens. So we're not going to ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, basically mobile is growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
is shrinking, because web is basically shrinking, and mobile's growing.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
You know, but the thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. When stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And I think a lot of it is just, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, all right, the team was like, OK. well, we're going public and investors really aren't going to like this if we are not making money for a year and a half. And it's like, well, a year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this. And we did it.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And it was a painful year and a half. And then we came out of that and we were in great shape. So I think people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing. And they knew that we were executing in a responsible way and basically focused and we're doing the right thing.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well and you're on one local hill and you need to jump to another hill, that's the stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one I think was, it was not fun. There have been a period, a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not the most fun periods.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Although that one, in retrospect, looks pretty good in retrospect. It's not that bad. It's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. Great. Great. Yeah, I'll take that.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think one of the things I reflect on over the last 10 years or so was the political environment just changed dramatically.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Before 2016, there was not a month that went by, except for maybe this IPO period, where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive. And then after 2016, after the election, basically there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And I think so much of this stuff is... correctly understanding your place in the world and in history.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And so I think we talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company, and that will take different forms over time. The political environment, I think I didn't have much
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
sophistication around, and I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I think that there was this basic challenge, and there were a lot of things. I don't wanna simplify this too much. I mean, there were a lot of things that we did wrong, there were some things that we did right, but I think one of the things that I look back on regret is I think we accepted,
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
other people's view of some of the things that, you know, they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually think we were. And, you know, that's, it's... There were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But I think that there's this view where when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue, I think the right instinct is to take ownership for it. Say, OK, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're going to fully own this problem. We're going to take responsibility for it. We're going to fix it. But when it's a political problem, I actually think a lot of the time
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Sometimes there are people who are operating in good faith who are identifying a problem that wants something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think to some degree, if you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, And your view is like, OK, I'm going to take responsibility for all this stuff.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
People are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society. And if we're saying, OK, we're going to really do our part to go fix this stuff, I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me kick you for more stuff.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And honestly, I think we should have been firmer and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. And my guess is if the IPO was a year and a half mistake. I think that the political miscalculation was a 20 year mistake. And so it started in 2016.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And I think that we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues and to figure out kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world. And I think we've,
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
sort of found our footing on what the principles are, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact, that I think we should push back on harder.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. But look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either. And we'll get through it. And I think we'll come out stronger.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think people get. And we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility. But I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah. I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. So I mean, I don't want to go rehash all the different things. But I think at this point, there's been years of academic research on a lot of these things.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And part of the thing that's challenging is, and one of the things that we've learned, is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time. Because when you get to a point where you're being accused of something, you're not super credible. Just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But what has worked over time is like, you do the research in advance and you get kind of third party academics, respected folks who get to debate all these different issues. And then it's like, oh no, actually like the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all. So I think that like, or it's, you know, so I think that it kind of cuts both ways.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
When you start when you're 19, it's like, hopefully we have more than 20 years left.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Well. In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn't done a good job, I mean, I don't want to blame them.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I wasn't thinking about that at the time. wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project. It's awesome. A lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's going to be pretty important in the world.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But I didn't know how to think in terms of long-term financial plans or... Like make the case to them why it would be worth more than a billion. Yeah, or just like, look, we're doing this for the long term. We're not planning on selling the company. So it's like without having made that case, it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
A lot of people, it's like this is like all their startup dreams come true. You've got to take this offer. Because I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically... articulate a lot of the stuff around where we were going longer term. It probably wasn't super confidence-inspiring to them when I was like, hey, I think we should turn this down because we're going to do this.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So after that, I was like, all right, well, I don't want to get fired from my own company for wanting to build it, so let's try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that. So... Learning through suffering.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, I mean, I think we're having a lot more fun now. They get to work on all the stuff. It's awesome.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, OK, I want to go start a company, so I'm going to go dive into this idea. And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous because there's this issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can figure out what works.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built 12 different things. that were just things that I wanted to exist. And I was like, all right, this is fun. OK, let's build another thing. It's like, OK, this one's fun. People are still using that. I'll help up keep this one.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But I had a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too. So I didn't know how to think about what a company was going to be. And so I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. Once you hire a bunch of people, It's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And there's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, okay, I'm going to change direction. People haven't invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction, and now I must be convinced. It's like, nah. So I do think that that's a thing where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back to it.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
being whatever the leanest version of a large company is that we can be. But I do think that there's something to that, where it's like, obviously it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you wanna do, but I think it also is problematic to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun. And then you can't attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you just have to dial it right.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I mean, well, I think some of the stuff, by the time you're at the scale that we're at, is also just about, like, what do you want to do over the next 10 to 20 years? And what do you think are going to be important?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And, you know, we were talking about, like, making your own luck and all that and how, you know, it's like, I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going. I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of, like, holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous thing. product, right?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It's just like everyone who had a phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we get is all the people in the world who already have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them, then this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world. And I think it's going to go a lot further than that.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So I know there's that. There is the thing about controlling our own destiny. It's strategically valuable.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
We did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various taxes that the platforms have to when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to, when they tell us we can't ship certain products so that way people use the things less or like them less.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be like twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot. Just from like a pure like dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff, but even like now I've learned a thing or two since the Yahoo days. So now I at least am able to like,
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It's great to be here. You know, I was watching... I was watching Jensen's video correcting the record, and I was thinking to myself, we might need to book the next one of these for all the things I'm going to have to apologize for that I'm going to say tonight.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I might not be able to convince all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in Reality Labs if I didn't control the company. But at least I can sort of articulate a case for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a values shift. over time is one of the things that some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me, that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And good is good. It's helpful. It's useful. It's things that people use on a day-to-day basis because it adds something to their lives. But awesome is different.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Awesome is uplifting and inspiring and just leads you to just be way more optimistic about the future. And it's just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And so I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good. We've built these products. More than 3 billion people use them. on a near daily basis.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah. And they use it because it is useful in their life. And in all these different ways. I mean, obviously, people vary. People use it for different things. But it's useful. And it helps people stay connected. It helps people build businesses. It helps people form communities. It's good. There aren't that many people on a day-to-day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck yeah, social media.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So I kind of think for my next stage, for the next stage of the company, the next 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good. And I think that they both matter. To me, this is a little bit of the next stage of what I want our company to stand for and be. And so I think a lot of the Reality Lab stuff that we're doing is going to be in that bucket.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think, is going to be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that bucket, too. New apps, too. But I don't know, I think that there's just something that's fundamentally pretty good about that. Maybe it's also just where I am in my life. I like to think I'm young, I'm a little older.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing. Also, in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring. And so there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on interesting science problems with Priscilla and my wife and a bunch of awesome people.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I get to design shirts with some of the best fashion designers in the world. Statues. A sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love. Wow. I'm not at all being facetious. It's really cool. I think Daniel Arsham is a really talented guy, and I was like, that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
One of my side projects is, we have this cattle ranch in Kauai, and I'm trying to see if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world. There's all this stuff. It starts with... It's awesome. We got this steer... Chonk? He's just the man. He's the man.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure. But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world. And we're just working with, you know, trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
If that's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years, then like, it's gonna be a good 15 or 20 years.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Oh, God. I mean, look, I think... Coming out hot, David. Yeah, no, I mean, he started it. Literally.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
No, I think that there might've been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies went remote temporarily and it was an interesting period to just like get some more time, like a step back. I'm a pretty introverted person and I do think it's,
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I need to be careful where like, I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself. And with COVID, I kind of got that. And it was a time of reflection where I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country. And our company was at the center of a lot of those things.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So that was a cause of a bunch of reflection. And then I think that a bunch of the things that we'd, spun up earlier, but at smaller scale. So the Reality Lab stuff that we started in 2014, really, the FAIR stuff around fundamental AI research, 2012, 13? 2012, 2013, sometime around then.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging, especially the early days when you're running a startup and, you know, there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility, everything is just getting thrashed so much. And it's not...
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
These things, they kind of got started, and they were growing, and it kind of reached this moment which is like, are we going to double down on this and do this, or are we going to kind of do this as a hobby? And I was like, no, I think we should do this. This is going to be a really important part of what we do.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And we had to make a really important set of decisions where we knew it was going to be really painful to... go double down on those things and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term before it's clearly the right thing to do.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
What I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they were gonna not like it. But I thought it was going to be OK, because I didn't think there was also going to be a recession at the same time. So that, really, it's like, I mean, look, you learn who you are through challenges.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It's like we had a really, OK, losing half of your market cap is quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap, or whatever it was. But so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions, right? It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had, which are like, should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with is yes. This is what I believe in.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think this is going to be important for the world. I think it's going to work over time. We're no stranger to going through painful periods. In some ways, it makes the company better. Let's do it. Thank you.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
You know, finding good short names... I mean, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while, because it was pretty clear that... Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate and is kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But the others, I mean, we went through a period where we had Facebook and a handful of small apps. And now we have four apps that have a billion people or more using them, hopefully in the next few years, five with threads, if that continues scaling. And...
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
This was a conversation that we had a bunch, where it's like, does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps, as it's really becoming a family of apps? And it was important to me, this was also coinciding with a lot of a lot of the challenges that we were having, the political brand challenges, different things.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand. They were like, oh, well, does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
You obviously look back, you have all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey, or the part of my life that I wish I could go back and relive. I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest, and that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It might make sense one day to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company because we do so many different things, but I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build because we run towards something. We don't run away from things. And when we got to Meta, then I was like, all right, we're here.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy. And it's like, look, if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah. I get it. But I don't know. We align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do, and we run towards it. That's always been how we've operated.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, no, I mean, we're a company that puts a flag down around what we're doing, and we're going to go do it. It's like, put a wall in front of us, there's going to be a mark-shaped hole in the wall.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I feel like you have a weekly challenge. I'm trying to do inspiring things. Yeah, I don't know. I'm also really competitive.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
What do you mean? I was just thinking about other things that I'm doing. What have I started doing? I got into all these more extreme sports and fighting and stuff. I don't know. We face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. There's the social media competitors. There's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
They kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing, but... I don't know. I think over the next 10, 15 years, I think that kind of, like, battle over, ideological battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms. Are they going to be the closed, integrated model that Apple has always done?
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think there were a lot of people for whom, if you knew how painful it would be along the way you wouldn't get started. But then, you know, I think that that's one of the things that's good about human nature is you can underestimate how painful things are going to be, so that way you can go and do good things.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Which, again, I mean, like, there's multiple good ways to build things, right? So I think if you look at the different generations of computing... PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed, integrated version and an open version. And the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I know that there are more Android phones out there, but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far has all the rights in the industry.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
CHRIS BROADFOOTIS- Yeah. I think that there's the recency bias, and probably almost everyone here has an iPhone. And I think because of the recency bias, there's sort of this view that's like, oh no, this is just the superior way to do things. But I don't actually think that's a given. In the PC era, Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And part of my goal for the next 10, 15 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry. Now, there are advantages of doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I think it's in some ways very deeply values-driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it's things like Llama and AI or the glasses or different things, should be for developers, like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me, to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about, and if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But I think part of what I'm trying to say is, I think there are different ways to build stuff. It's like our way worked for me and our team. Different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
One day my daughter, we took her to a Taylor Swift concert and she was like, you know, dad, I kind of want to be like Taylor Swift when I grow up. I was like, you can't. That's not available to you. I was like, but, and she thought about it, and she's like, all right, when I grow up, I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg. And I was like, hell yeah. Hell yeah.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So I think that that's, yeah, I don't know. I think it's like, look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
I do. I used to only wear one type of shirt. Now I've moved on.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, you know, I, um... I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And so I figured, look, we're going to design eyewear. We're going to design other stuff that people wear. Let's get good at this. And so this one, I actually worked with this great fashion designer, Mike Amiri. And he's got a great story.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So I wouldn't be surprised if you were doing one of these with him one day. This one is, so I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is pathémathos, learning through suffering. It's a little family saying and also Aeschylus.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Um... Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And I mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
But this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? It's like, I feel like When you go to start a company, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be. But values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors. And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
So yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
You're still here. But first. I kind of think my, you know, like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again and that's how he succeeds. That one really resonates with me too.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, so thanks. I'm excited about them too. At Meta, we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. And originally, it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. We're not a social app company. We are a social connection company. We talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
That's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, on a small screen. So when you think about, when we got started, we were like a handful of kids. We weren't able, we didn't have the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And also, Facebook originally got started around the same time as a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences, not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience? So I think what you would like to have
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
It's not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you, not just a small screen. I think what you ideally have is glasses. Through the glasses, there's one part of it where the glasses, they can see what you see and they can hear what you hear.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing. But then part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world. And that way, your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
In the not-so-distant future, you can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but maybe one of us isn't even here. They're just like a hologram, and we have glasses. There's the question of... Delivering a realistic sense of presence.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around the feeling of human presence and being there with another person and this physical perception where we're very physical beings. People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
This physical sense of presence that you're with another person doing things in the physical world is something that you're going to be able to do through holograms through glasses without being taken away from whatever else you're doing. Just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world. It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
And I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like, all right, there's some people. It's like maybe I'm physically here. There's a person. You're a hologram there. There's an AI that is embodied as someone who is there. And the glasses will enable this. So how are we going after this, building this? This is some huge project.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
We've been working on it for 10 years. And there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. You have to build a novel display stack. These aren't just screens like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
There's brand new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created. And then they need to be put into glasses. They need to be miniaturized. And you also, in the glasses, need to fit chips, microphones, speakers, cameras, eye tracking to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
MATT SULLIVAN- It's like, OK, it's a pretty big challenge. So we're like, all right, let's go try to go for the big thing. And we've been working on that for a while. And we're pretty close to being able to show off the first prototype that we have of that, and I'm really excited about that.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of, all right, so that's a lot of new technology that needs to get developed, a lot to pack into a form factor, because the glasses have to be good looking, too. So what if we just constrain ourselves to like, we're gonna work with a great partner, Essilor Luxottica, they make Ray-Ban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible. And I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those that it was almost like a practice project. for, like, for the ultimate AR.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Yeah, no, this is, yeah, let's go on a tangent there for a second. So I started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. And I remember we got off the plane. We were driving down 101. We're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo. This is amazing.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
All these great companies. One day, maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook. And I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.
Acquired
The Mark Zuckerberg Interview
Oh, no, no. It was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened. But anyway. Yeah, I mean, a lot of hard work, obviously. But just at the time, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't think this is it.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I tried.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It has Sunday ticket.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Like... I mean, NASA didn't have a choice. Yeah, yeah.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Thank you, Emily.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Everybody, Jensen Wong.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It's great to be here. You know, I was watching Jensen's video, Correcting the Record, and I was thinking to myself, we might need to book the next one of these for all the things I'm going to have to apologize for that I'm going to say tonight.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I don't apologize anymore.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Oh, God. I mean, look, I think... Coming out hot, David.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Literally. I think there's something to Jensen's original sentiment, which is that the entrepreneurial journey is very challenging, especially the early days when you're running a startup and you know there's the sense that what you're doing could just die at any moment and the volatility everything is just getting thrashed so much and it's not
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
You obviously look back, you have all these fond memories, but it was not the most fun part of the journey, or the part of my life that I wish I could go back and relive. I do think that there's something to what Jensen was saying that I thought was very honest, and that when I heard him say it the first time, I was like, yeah, I get that.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think there were a lot of people for whom, if you knew how painful it would be along the way you wouldn't get started. But then, you know, I think that that's one of the things that's good about human nature is you can underestimate how painful things are going to be so that way you can go and do good things.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, you know, I, um... I started working with people to design some of my own clothes. And so I figured, look, we're going to design eyewear. We're going to design other stuff that people wear. Let's get good at this. And so this one, I actually worked with this great fashion designer, Mike Amiri. And he's got a great story.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I wouldn't be surprised if you were doing one of these with him one day. This one is, so I've kind of started working on this series of shirts with some of my favorite classical sayings on them. So this one is pathémathos, learning through suffering. It's a little family saying and also Aeschylus.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Um... Well, I think you learn what matters to you and what's important and kind of your place in the world through repeatedly hitting your head against different challenges. And I mean, I think that that is sort of, that's the journey, right? I mean, that's the entrepreneurial journey. It's also, I think, part of the beauty of building things.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But this is something that Jensen talks a lot about too, right? It's like, I feel like When you go to start a company, everyone kind of writes down what they would like their values to be. But values are not what you write down on the wall. It's like your lived behaviors. And you only really learn what you care about when you have to make hard trade-offs and face challenges.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So yeah, you learn the most important things through facing challenges.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
You're still here. But first... I kind of think my... You know like that old Nike Michael Jordan ad where he's talking about how he's failed over and over and over again and that's how he succeeds? That one really resonates with me too.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, so... Thanks, I'm excited about them too. So, you know, at Meta we've been building social experiences for 20 years now. And originally it took the form of a website, then mobile apps. But the thing is, I never thought about us as a social media company. We're not a social app company. We are a... a social connection company, right?
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I mean, we talk about what we're doing is building the future of human connection. And that's not only going to be constrained over time to what you can do on a phone, right, on a small screen. So when you think about, you know, when we got started, okay, we're like a handful of kids.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
You know, we weren't able, we didn't have the resources at the time to go define whatever the next computing platform is. And also, you know, Facebook originally got started around the same time as a bunch of the early smartphones and those platforms got started. So we didn't really get to play any role in developing that platform.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And one of the big themes, I think, for the next chapter of what we do is I want to be able to build what I think are sort of the ideal experiences, not just what you're allowed to build on some platform that someone else built, but what is actually, if you can think from first principles, what is the ideal social experience?
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I think what you would like to have is not a phone that you look down at that kind of takes your attention away from the things and the people around you, not just a small screen. I think what you ideally have is glasses. Through the glasses, there's one part of it where the glasses, they can see what you see and they can hear what you hear.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And in doing so, they can be kind of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context on what you're doing. But then part of that is also that the glasses can project images, basically like holograms, out into the world. And that way, your social experiences with other people aren't constrained to these little interactions you can have on a phone screen.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
In the not-so-distant future, you can imagine, because you guys have demoed some of the stuff that we've done, a version of this where we're having a conversation like this, but maybe one of us isn't even here. They're just like a hologram, and we have glasses. There's the question of... Delivering a realistic sense of presence.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
There's something magical in the realm of building social experiences around the feeling of human presence and being there with another person and this physical perception where we're very physical beings. People like to intellectualize everything, but a lot of our experience is very physical.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
This physical sense of presence that you're with another person doing things in the physical world is something that you're going to be able to do through holograms through glasses without being taken away from whatever else you're doing. Just kind of have that mixed in with the rest of the world. It's going to be, I think, the ultimate digital social experience.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like, all right, there's some people. It's like maybe I'm physically here. There's a person. You're a hologram there. There's an AI that is embodied as someone who is there. And the glasses will enable this. So how are we going after this, building this? This is some huge project.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We've been working on it for 10 years. And there are a lot of different challenges to solve to get there. You have to build a novel display stack. These aren't just screens like the kind that are in phones. There's this long lineage. They're connected to the screens that have been in TVs and monitors and things for a long time. There's been this massive optimization of the supply chain.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
There's brand new display stack around holographic displays that basically need to get created. And then they need to be put into glasses. They need to be miniaturized. And you also, in the glasses, need to fit chips, microphones, speakers, cameras, eye-tracking to be able to understand what you're doing, batteries to make it last all day.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
DAN GALPIN- Yeah, it's like, OK, it's a pretty big challenge. So we're like, all right, let's go try to go for the big thing. And we've been working on that for a while. And we're pretty close to being able to show off the first prototype that we have of that, and I'm really excited about that.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
At the same time, we also came at it from this lens of, all right, so that's a lot of new technology that needs to get developed, a lot to pack into a form factor, because the glasses have to be good looking, too. So what if we just constrain ourselves to like, we're gonna work with a great partner, Essilor Luxottica, they make Ray-Ban, they make a lot of the iconic glasses.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Let's see what we can fit into glasses today and make them as useful as possible. And I actually, I kind of thought when we were getting started with those that it was almost like a practice project. for, like, for the ultimate AR.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
That's true. That's true. Yeah, I did.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
That's true. Yeah, no, this is, yeah, let's go on a tangent there for a second. So I started Facebook in school, came out to Silicon Valley with Dustin and a handful of people working on it at the time. And we did that because Silicon Valley is where all the startups came from. And I remember we got off the plane. We were driving down 101. We're like, wow, eBay, Yahoo. Like, this is amazing.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
All these great companies. One day, maybe we'll build a company like this. And I'd already started Facebook. And I was like, surely the project that we're working on now is not a company.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Oh, no, no. It was a great project. I just didn't have the ambition to turn it into a company at the time. That just kind of happened. But anyway. Yeah, I mean... A lot of hard work, obviously. But just at the time, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't think this is it.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I didn't know. So yeah, so I mean, the glasses though, you know, we thought that this was like, all right, we want to get working with Estee Lauder Luxottica so we can start building more and more advanced glasses. And then, you know, they're really good. They look good. And then AI, like the massive transformation in AI.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, a few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of like full-scale AI. And now I think it's probably going to be the other order. So now it's like, all right, great. Well, this is actually a great product because it's got the cameras so it can see what you see. It's got the microphone. It's got the speakers. You can talk to it.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I remember calling Alex Himmel, the guy who runs the product group that's running it, and I'm like, Hey, you know, I think we should probably pivot this and make it so that Meta AI is the primary feature of it. And then, like, I remember I came in the next week and they built a prototype of it on Tuesday. And it was like, all right, good. Yeah, no, this is good.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
This is going to be a very successful product.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, that tracks. That's what I just said. Sounds right.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think it's that we're a technology company that is focused on human connection, not a specific type of app. So we never thought about ourselves as a website or a social network or anything like that.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
For me, building this kind of glasses to enable the future of people being able to feel present with another person no matter where they actually physically are is the natural continuation of the kind of apps that we build today. But it depends on how you define what you are. And then you need to figure out well, how do you give yourself the competence to actually go do that?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And that's where I think being a strong technology company comes in. Because, you know, a lot of companies, I think, think about themselves too narrowly in terms of, okay, well, we're this kind of one thing, and the reason why we can build all these things is because we have a really strong technology foundation. And some of that is just... me and how I think about stuff.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I was an engineer before I got started. I mostly took systems engineering type classes when I was in college. So you talk about Friendster and MySpace and all the scaling challenges they had doing the graph calculations of like, all right, do you know this person? Should you show them their page?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I think it's a combination of a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. So you want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and built a good organization around. And it's one of the things that I... observed as soon as I came out to the Valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The companies I was talking about, it's like, The CEO wasn't technical.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
The board of directors had no one technical on it. They had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical, and everyone else wasn't. It's like, all right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. So I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually want...
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
like a lot of the people on our management team, it's like, you know, splits mostly people running either these big product groups who've come up through different technical pathways at the company. And I think that there's like a balance, right? It's like, you don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But if you don't have enough of your kind of share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. And I think that that also is important to the board. And I think it just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that that's one of the things that has been really fundamental, right?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It's like we're able to kind of go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. And for that, I think we also, I think are a pretty curious and learning focused organization where
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
You know, I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing and more as how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible how to make each thing better for the people we're trying to serve. So I define our strategy as we can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get a bunch of feedback. We're going to learn what people like better than other people.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And then over time, by the time you get to, whether it's version 3 or 4 or 5, I mean, they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently. It's you just... you learn faster. So that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, learn from what people are kind of focused on in the world, and iterate as quickly as you can.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But you're very generous. Well, but that's the thing. Part of it is like, OK, you want to set up the game so that way you optimize, you create your luck.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Well, great engineering and speed and iteration are actually two different values. They're not necessarily at odds, but I think there are a lot of great engineering organizations that try to build things that are super high quality and have good competence around that. But there's a certain... personality that goes with taking your stuff and putting it out there before it's fully polished.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And look, I'm not saying that our strategy or approach on this is the only one that works. I think in a lot of ways, we're the opposite of Apple. And clearly, their stuff has worked really well, too. But they take this approach. It's like, we're going to take a long time. We're going to polish it. We're going to put it out.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And maybe for the stuff that they're doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture. But for us, I think that there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you're almost at the line of being embarrassed about what you put out. You want to put stuff out early enough so you can get good feedback. you obviously want to test things that are reasonable hypotheses.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So if it's so ineffective, then you're not testing a good hypothesis. That doesn't work. But I do think a lot of the conversations that we have are like, OK, well, we can get this to be a lot better if we work on it for another couple of months or whatever.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I do just think that you want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Because I think if you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you're missing a bunch of the time when you could have learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you were going to ship.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Well, I would like to hope that it's not damaging to the brand, but... Well, but innately it is.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, I don't want to overstate it. I mean, we don't ship things that we think are bad, but we also don't take... We want to make sure that we're shipping things that... that are kind of early enough that we can get good feedback to see what they're going to be most used for.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Like, I think a lot of the AI stuff that we're building now, for example, it actually, you know, it's pretty clear that AI is going to be transformative for a lot of different things. It is actually less clear what are going to be the initial use cases for a lot of these things that are super valuable.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And so, okay, part of it is like, okay, you put something out, you want to kind of collect feedback and what people are actually, what it's, you know, where it's resonating. Now, if If what you put out is bad, then you're not going to collect good data because people aren't going to use it for anything because it sucks.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I do think that you have hypotheses for what people might really want to use it for. And they're not all going to be right. And you want to kind of go early enough on that as more, yeah.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Does it have to be one or the other? I mean, I think it's a combination. I think you're basically taking some kind of values, either kind of like values that you have or a value for something that you believe should exist in the world and trying to build something that's aligned with that while trying to match it up with what is going to resonate the most with people.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things. And if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers. So I think both probably matter. Yeah.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I mean, I think that there's There's certainly a lot of things that we've invented or created for the first time. I mean, in 2006, when we built the first version of News Feed, before that, social networks were basically profiles. And then we were like, hey, people actually kind of want to get the updates. And let's show them that. And if we rank them, then we can.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
There's so many updates that this can help people parse through that quickly. And today, it's hard to imagine any social product without a feed. So I think that that's obviously there. Some of these things are sort of seminal. I don't want to call it an invention, but like patterns that we basically established first.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And then some of them are ones that other people did where we take pride in learning from what is working in the world. You know, we're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people like discovered that were good first. And then we build a better version of it. And I mean, I think that that's, You know, no one company is going to invent everything.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think if you don't invent anything, then it's hard to kind of be a successful company. But I do think that there's a mix of this. There are more smart people outside of your company than inside your company.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
If you're not learning from what's going on in the market, then you're missing a lot of opportunities to get valuable signal from people in the community and customers about what they want you to be doing.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think almost all of the major technology companies at this point are primarily using open source stacks. So yeah, I mean, we wouldn't have been able to get built without open source. I think probably that's true for any new company that's been created since like, I don't know, the late 1990s or something. For us, open source has been important and valuable.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, yeah. No, and it's great. It makes it super easy to develop stuff quickly and iterate quickly. But we've also had an interesting relationship with this because, sequentially, as a company, we came after Google. So Google was the first of the great companies that built this distributed computing infrastructure. So they came first.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
They were like, all right, let's keep this proprietary because it's a big advantage for us. And then we're like, all right, we need that too. But we built it. And then we're like, OK, not an advantage for us because Google already has that. So we might as well just make it open. And by making it open, then you basically get this whole community of people building around it.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So it wasn't going to help us compete with Google for, any of the stuff that we were doing to have that technology. But what we were able to do with things like Open Compute were get it to become the industry standard. So now you have all these other cloud service platforms that basically use Open Compute.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And because of that, the supply chain is standardized around our designs, which means that it's way more supply, way cheaper to produce. We've saved billions of dollars. And the quality of the stuff that we get to use goes up. So all right, that's like a win-win. I think in order for this to work, we do a lot of open source stuff. We do a lot of closed source stuff. I'm not like a zealot on this.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think open source is very valuable. But I also think it sort of makes sense for us because of our position in the market. And the same for AI. I'm going to run long.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah. You know, similar deal. You know, we want to make sure that we have access to a leading AI model, right? I think just like we want to build the hardware so that we can build the best social experiences for the next 20 years, I don't think that... You know, for us, it's like we've just been... We've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on anyone else.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And we're a big enough company at this point that we don't have to. We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's going to be AR glasses or mixed reality or AI. So I think that's somewhat of an imperative for us to go do that. But these things are not like pieces of software that are monolithic. They're ecosystems. They get better when other people use them. So for us,
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
There's a huge amount of good, and it philosophically lines up with where we are. I mean, look, I definitely firsthand have a lot of experiences where you're trying to build stuff on mobile platforms, and the platforms are just like, nah, you can't build that. That's frustrating.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
What's up?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We can take a detour.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Okay, this is quite a detour. Quite a detour.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I'm sorry. I was like really wound up.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It was a pretty different technical issue. So I mean, our legacy was building on web for websites. And we were very used to building one thing and being able to continuously deploy it. And it fits with our iteration style and all that. So now, all of a sudden, this app model comes along. And it's like, we have to build, like, different ones for each phone.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And you have to go through approval to get it shipped. And we have to wait weeks before it can ship. It's like, this sucks. So we're like, all right, we have an idea. Let's build this platform where we can get a web-based platform. So you basically build a native shell. And you build this web-based platform in it. And we'll be able to just update our apps every day. And we'll ship one thing once.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And we'll update our apps across Android and iPhone. Blackberry and Windows Mobile and all the stuff that existed at the time because it hadn't gotten consolidated yet. And we're like, basically, whatever downside we are going to have from not having the most native thing, we're going to make up for in velocity and by having way more of our energy focused on one platform. Well, we were wrong.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It turned out that having the native integration was actually critical for having the interactions feel good. So we basically went through this period where we had to go rewrite our apps from scratch. And that coincided with mobile growing dramatically. And mobile, we didn't have any revenue. because it may seem like it's pretty similar, but there's a very big difference.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
On desktop, you basically have the app, and you have a column on the side that we could put ads. And on mobile, we needed to figure out what does it mean to put ads into the experience?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, that was something that the team did. Yeah, and advertisers have specific formats that they like working with, and the idea that we were just going to be like, all right, now your ad is going to look like a feed story was a big challenge for advertisers.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And the idea that now for people, you were going to have this organic feed that was the most important part of the product, and now we're just going to start putting ads in it was a challenge for the people using the product. We needed to figure that out, and we needed to get the apps to be better. And we basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We were just like, look, we're going to pause feature development of the company because it's hard enough to do a rewrite. If you look at the history of the tech industry, there are all these examples like Netscape and all these things that they tried to do a rewrite. They needed to reestablish their technical platform, and they also tried to add features. They basically just never terminated.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So that's a real risk when you're completely changing your underlying platform that you're going to miss it. I was like, all right, we've got to minimize the chance that that happens. So we're not going to ship any new features. We're just going to rewrite it, make it faster. But while we're doing this, basically mobile is growing. So the percent of our traffic that is monetizable
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
is shrinking, because web is basically shrinking and mobile's growing.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, and I was like, all right.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
The thing is, it was actually pretty clear what we needed to do. I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. When stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear what you have to do.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I think a lot of it is just, do you have the pain tolerance to go do it? So a lot of this was like, all right, the team was like, OK. well, we're going public and investors really aren't going to like this if we are not making money for a year and a half. And it's like, well, a year and a half is short in the grand scheme of things. Let's do this. And we did it.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And it was a painful year and a half. And then we came out of that and we were in great shape. So I think people inside the company had felt a lot better sooner because it was pretty clear to people that we were doing the right thing. And they knew that we were executing in a responsible way and basically focused and we're doing the right thing.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I think it's actually when you have something that's working well and you're on one local hill and you need to jump to another hill, that's the stuff that's really culturally hard. But this one I think was, it was not fun. There have been a period, a series of periods throughout the company that were not, I don't know, not the most fun periods.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Although that one, in retrospect, looks pretty good in retrospect. It's like, not that bad. It's like your market cap only got cut in half for a year and a half. Great. Great. Yeah, I'll take that. Anyway, where were we?
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I mean, there's so many things that we've messed up that there are many criticisms that are legitimate. But if that was a year and a half mistake, I think one of the things I reflect on over the last 10 years or so was the political environment just changed dramatically.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Before 2016, there was not a month that went by, except for maybe this IPO period, where the sentiment about the company was anything but positive. And then after 2016, after the election, basically there was not a month for a while where the sentiment about the company was positive. And I think so much of this stuff is... correctly understanding your place in the world and in history.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And so I think we talked about before how it's like, I think we understood that we are a technology company and that you have to be a technology company to build this kind of thing. I think we understood that we're not a social network company, we're a human connection company, and that will take different forms over time. The political environment, I think I didn't have much
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
sophistication around. And I think I just fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem. So I think that there was this basic challenge. And there were a lot of things. I don't want to simplify this too much. There were a lot of things that we did wrong. There were some things that we did right. But I think one of the things that I look back on regret is I think we accepted
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
other people's view of some of the things that, you know, they were asserting that we were doing wrong or were responsible for that I don't actually think we were. And, you know, that's, it's... There were a lot of things we did mess up and we needed to fix.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I think that there's this view where when you're a company and someone says that there's an issue, I think the right instinct is to take ownership for it. Say like, okay, maybe it's not all our thing, but we're gonna fully own this problem, we're gonna take responsibility for it, we're gonna fix it. But when it's a political problem, I actually think a lot of the time,
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Sometimes there are people who are operating in good faith who are identifying a problem that wants something to be fixed, and there are people who are just looking for someone to blame. And I think to some degree, if you
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
if you take responsibility for things because you think it's a corporate crisis, not a political crisis, and your view is like, okay, I'm going to take responsibility for all this stuff. People are basically blaming social media and the tech industry for all these different things in society. And if we're saying, okay, we're going to really do our part to go fix this stuff.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I know there were a bunch of people who just took that and were like, oh, you're taking responsibility for that? Let me kick you for more stuff. And honestly, I think we should have been firmer and clearer about which of the things we actually felt like we had a part in and which ones we didn't. And my guess is if the IPO was a year and a half mistake.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think that the political miscalculation was a 20 year mistake. And so it started in 2016. And I think that we have been working super hard to fix a lot of issues and to figure out kind of what the right tone is for navigating what is a very kind of fraught political dynamic across both the country and multiplied across all these places around the world. And I think we've
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
sort of found our footing on what the principles are, where we think we need to improve stuff, but where people make allegations about the impact of the tech industry or our company, which are just not founded in any fact, that I think we should push back on harder.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place. But look, in the grand scheme of things, 20 years isn't that bad either. And we'll get through it. And I think we'll come out stronger.
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Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I do think that is one of the kind of more interesting critiques that I think people get. And we get critiques on both sides on that. There are people who don't think we've taken enough responsibility. But I think certainly there's one line of critique, which is you kind of bought into too much of the stuff that you shouldn't have.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And yeah, I think it's going to take us a long time to dig out of that.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah. I mean, at this point, I think a lot of this stuff has been studied. So I don't want to go rehash all the different things. But I think at this point, there's been years of academic research on a lot of these things.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And part of the thing that's challenging is, and one of the things that we've learned, is we actually should be trying to support more academics and doing more of this research ahead of time. Because when you get to a point where you're being accused of something, you're not super credible. Just standing up yourself and being like, I don't think we did this one.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But what has worked over time is like, you do the research in advance and you get kind of third party academics, respected folks who get to debate all these different issues. And then it's like, oh, no, actually, like the evidence just does not show that social media is correlated with this kind of harm at all. So I think that like, or it's, you know, so I think that it kind of cuts both ways.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
When you start when you're 19, it's like, hopefully we have more than 20 years left. And hopefully you have Buffett duration.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Well. In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn't done a good job communicating, I mean, I don't want to blame them.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I hadn't done a good job communicating the long-term vision because I wasn't thinking about that at the time. I wasn't thinking in terms of this as a company. I was like, this is a great project. It's awesome. A lot of people like what we're doing. I think this will probably continue for a while. I think it's going to be pretty important in the world.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I didn't know how to think in terms of long-term financial plans or... Like, make the case to them why it would be worth more than a billion. Yeah, yeah. Or just like, look, we're doing this for the long term. We're not planning on selling the company. So it's like, without having made that case, it was understandable that basically Yahoo comes around.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
A lot of people, it's like, this is like all their startup dreams come true. You've got to take this offer. Because I just wasn't in a place where I had the sophistication to basically...
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
articulate a lot of the stuff around where we were going longer term it probably wasn't super confidence inspiring to them when i was like hey i think we should turn this down because we're gonna do this so um so after that i was like all right well i don't want to get fired from my own company for wanting to build it so let's uh try to set up a governance structure that makes it somewhat harder to do that um so
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Learning through suffering.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, I mean, I think we're having a lot more fun now. We get to work on all the stuff. It's awesome.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Obviously, starting a company is not bad. I think that there's different schools of thought on how to do it. I think some people think, OK, I want to go start a company, so I'm going to go dive into this idea. And I just think that that's a little bit dangerous because there's this issue, which is you have to be able to be nimble and pivot around until you can figure out what works.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Part of the reason why I didn't think Facebook was going to be the company early on was because when I was in school, I built 12 different things. that were just things that I wanted to exist. And I was like, all right, this is fun. OK, let's build another thing. It's like, OK, this one's fun. People are still using that. I'll help up keep this one.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But I had a bunch of other ideas for stuff I was going to build too. So I didn't know how to think about what a company was going to be. And so I think there's something about maintaining flexibility that's helpful. Once you hire a bunch of people, It's a lot easier when you can just have meetings in your own head about what direction you want to go in.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And there's a lot less pride and people dug in when you're just like, OK, I'm going to change direction. People haven't invested their ego in like, no, we were going in this direction. And now I must be convinced. It's like, nah. So I do think that that's a thing where you want to keep things lean and be able to do that. And that's one of the reasons why we tried to get the company back to it.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
being whatever the leanest version of a large company is that we can be. But I do think that there's something to that, where it's like, obviously it's not super fun not having the resources to do what you wanna do, but I think it also is problematic. to have more people working on something than you should have for the stage that it's at.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Because then the people who are working on it don't have the agency to actually make the changes and do the things that they need to, which is less fun. And then you can't attract the best people to go work on those things because it's less fun. And so I do think you just have to dial it right.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I mean, well, I think some of the stuff, by the time you're at the scale that we're at, is also just about, like, what do you want to do over the next 10 to 20 years? And what do you think are going to be important?
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And, you know, we were talking about, like, making your own luck and all that and how, you know, it's like, I think there are some broad strokes that we can have a sense of where things are going. I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of, like, holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous... product, right?
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It's just like everyone who had a phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we get is all the people in the world who already have glasses upgrading to glasses that have AI in them, then this is already going to be one of the most successful products in the history of the world. And I think it's going to go a lot further than that.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I know there's that. There is the thing about controlling our own destiny. It's strategically valuable.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various taxes that the platforms have to when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we think we should be able to, when they tell us we can't ship certain products so that way people use the things less or like them less.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be twice as profitable if we own the platform or something. So I think from that perspective, that's worth a lot. Just from a pure dollars perspective, which is not primarily how I come at this stuff. But even now, I've learned a thing or two since the Yahoo days.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So now I at least am able to like, I might not be able to convince all the investors that we should be investing to the extent that we are in Reality Labs if I didn't control the company. But at least I can sort of articulate a case for why I am confident that it's going to be good over time. But for me, it's always been way more about the product experience and what you can enable and build.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And one of the shifts, and this is sort of like a values shift over time, is one of the things that Some of the early Oculus guys used to say to me that there's a difference between building good things and awesome things. And good is good. It's helpful. It's useful. It's things that people use on a day-to-day basis because it adds something to their lives. But awesome is different.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Awesome is uplifting and inspiring and just like leads you to just be way more optimistic about the future. And it's just like this uplifting thing about humanity. And so I think a lot of what we've done with social media so far is very good. We've built these products. More than three billion people use them. on a near daily basis.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah. And they use it because it is useful in their life. And in all these different ways. I mean, obviously, people vary. People use it for different things. But it's useful. And it helps people stay connected. It helps people build businesses. It helps people form communities. It's good. There aren't that many people on a day-to-day basis who get out of bed and are like, fuck yeah, social media.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I kind of think for my next stage, for the next stage of the company, the next 15 years, I want us to build more things that are awesome in addition to things that are good. And I think that they both matter. To me, this is a little bit of the next stage of what I want our company to stand for and be. And so I think a lot of the Reality Lab stuff that we're doing is going to be in that bucket.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
A lot of the AI stuff that we're doing, I think, is going to be in that bucket. There are a bunch of things in the apps that are going to be in that bucket, too. New apps, too. But I don't know, I think that there's just something that's fundamentally pretty good about that. Maybe it's also just where I am in my life. I like to think I'm young, I'm a little older.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I do think that at this point, it's not just a meta thing. Also, in my personal life, a lot of what I personally value is doing things that are inspiring with people who I find inspiring. And so there's the personal version of this. It's like I get to work on interesting science problems with Priscilla and my wife and a bunch of awesome people.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I get to design shirts with some of the best fashion designers in the world. Statues. A sculpture of my wife. Bring back the Roman tradition of designing sculptures of people you love. I'm not at all being facetious. It's really cool. I think Daniel Arsham is a really talented guy. And I was like, that's a person who I'd love to work with on something. Let's go find a project.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
One of my side projects is we have this cattle ranch in Kauai. And I'm trying to see if we can raise the highest quality beef in the world. And there's all this stuff. It starts with like, it's awesome. We got this steer. Chonk? He's just the man. He's the man.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
We're having a hard time keeping him on the ranch because every time we put him in a steel enclosure and he sees a female cow, he busts through the steel enclosure. But I feel like that's the kind of bull that you want to make the highest quality beef in the world. And we're just working with, you know, trying to do really high quality, awesome things with awesome people.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
If that's what I get to do for the next 15 or 20 years, then like, it's gonna be a good 15 or 20 years.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
No, I think that there might have been something around the way the company shifted in operations around COVID. I mean, it's like the COVID, like all these tech companies went remote temporarily and it was an interesting period to just like get some more time, like a step back.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I'm a pretty introverted person and I do think it's, I need to be careful where like I get a lot of value and energy and ideas from being around other people, but I also need time with myself. And with COVID, I kind of got that. And it was a time of reflection where I was able to think about this stuff. And we were also going through this very difficult political time in the country.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
2012, 2013, sometime around then. These things, they kind of got started, and they were growing, and it kind of reached this moment which is like, are we gonna double down on this and do this, or are we gonna kind of do this as a hobby? And I was like, no, I think we should do this. I mean, this is going to be a really important part of what we do.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And we had to make a really important set of decisions. What we knew was going to be really painful to go double down on those things and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term before it's clearly the right thing to do.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
The, what I didn't know was that at the time, I thought they were gonna not like it, but I thought it was gonna be okay because I didn't think there was also gonna be a recession at the same time. So that, like really, it's like, I mean, look, like you learn who you are through challenges, right?
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It's like we had like a really, you know, it's like, okay, like losing half of your market cap is quaint compared to losing 80% of your market cap or whatever it was, right? But so, I mean, these are all intentional decisions, right? It's like, I mean, there are a lot of conversations that we had, which are like, should we go forward with this? And the answer that I came out with is yes.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
This is what I believe in. I think this is going to be important for the world. I think it's going to work over time. We're no stranger to going through painful periods. In some ways, it makes the company better. Let's do it. Thank you.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I like Meta. It's a good name. Finding good short names, this actually was a thing that we talked about for a while, because it was pretty clear that Facebook is continuing to grow in importance in the world, which I think a lot of people don't appreciate and is kind of mind-boggling at the scale that it's at.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
But the others, I mean, we went through a period where it's like we had Facebook and a handful of small apps. And now we have four apps that have a billion people or more using them, hopefully in the next few years, five, with threads, if that continues scaling.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
This was a conversation that we had a bunch, where it's like, does it make sense for the name of the company to be one of the apps as the other apps, as it's really becoming a family of apps? And it was important to me, this was also coinciding with a lot of a lot of the challenges that we were having, the political brand challenges, different things.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And a lot of people were proposing that from the perspective of running away from the Facebook brand. They were like, oh, well, does the Facebook brand have issues? Do we need a new brand? And I was like, we don't run away from that.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
It might make sense one day to not have Facebook be the lead brand for the company because we do so many different things, but I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build because we run towards something. We don't run away from things. And when we got to Meta, then I was like, all right, we're here.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And it was around the time when we were doubling down on the investment and where there was all the controversy. And it's like, look, if we're doing this, we're going to lean into this and we're going to do it. So let's do it.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah. I get it. But I don't know. we align around a vision and a mission of what we're trying to do and we run towards it. That's always been how we've operated. Yeah.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, no, I mean, we're a company that puts a flag down around what we're doing and we're going to go do it. It's like, put a wall in front of us, there's going to be a mark-shaped hole in the wall.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
What do you mean?
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I just like, I'm trying to do inspiring things. I mean, yeah, I don't know. I'm also really competitive.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
What do you mean? I was just thinking about other things that I'm doing. I'm like, what have I started doing? I got into all these more extreme sports and fighting and stuff. I don't know. We face a lot of competition and a lot of different aspects of what we do. There's the social media competitors. There's the platform competitors. I think Apple is a bigger competitor than people realize.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
They kind of think, hey, they're doing a different type of thing, but I don't know. I think over the next 10, 15 years, I think that kind of like battle over, ideological battle over what should the architecture be of the next set of platforms. Are they going to be the closed integrated model that Apple has always done? Which again, I mean, there are multiple good ways to build things.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I think if you look at the different generations of computing, PCs, mobile, they've all had sort of a closed, integrated version and an open version. And the thing that I think there's just a ton of recency bias around is because iPhone basically won.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I know that there are more Android phones out there, but iPhone is sort of like the intellectual leader and by far has all the rounds in the industry.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
CHRIS BROADFOOTIS- And then there's the recency bias. And probably almost everyone here has an iPhone. And I think that because of the recency bias, there's sort of this view that's like, oh no, this is just the superior way to do things. But I don't actually think that's a given. In the PC era, Windows with the open ecosystem was the leader.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And part of my goal for the next 10, 15 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry. Now, there are advantages of doing a closed and integrated model. I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
And I think it will not be... just a product competition.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I think it's in some ways very deeply values-driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it's things like Llama and AI or the Glasses or different things, should be for developers, like an individual, someone getting started in their dorm room like me, to not have to ask for permission to go build the next set of awesome things.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, just do something that you care about. And I mean, if you're trying to run our strategy, try to learn as quickly as you can. But I mean, I think part of what I'm trying to say is, I think there are different ways to build stuff, right? It's like our way worked for me and our team. Different things have clearly worked for other companies. I don't know.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
One day my daughter, we took her to a Taylor Swift concert and she was like, you know, dad, I kind of want to be like Taylor Swift when I grow up. Hell yeah. I was like, but you can't. That's not available to you. I was like, but, and she thought about it, and she's like, all right, when I grow up, I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg. And I was like, hell yeah. Hell yeah.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
So I think that that's, yeah, I don't know. I think it's like, look, learn from other people's successes and failures, but do your own thing. I love that.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
I do. I used to only wear one type of shirt. Now I've moved on.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Thank you.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Awesome.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Thank you.
Acquired
Acquired LIVE from Chase Center (with Daniel Ek, Emily Chang, Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg)
Thank you, Hermes. So we look quite presentable.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Meta's scorched earth approach to AI, Tesla's future, TikTok bill, FTC bans noncompetes, wealth tax
it's probably also pretty bad for one institution to have an AI that is way more powerful than everyone else's AI.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Meta's scorched earth approach to AI, Tesla's future, TikTok bill, FTC bans noncompetes, wealth tax
And I kind of think that a world where AI is very widely deployed in a way where it's gotten hardened progressively over time and is one where all the different systems will be in check in a way that seems like it is fundamentally more healthy to me than one where this is more concentrated.
Coder Radio
589: Blame the Tools using the Tools
Is there a current set of methods that seem to be scaling very well? Right. So. With past AI architectures, you could kind of feed an AI system a certain amount of data and use a certain amount of compute, but eventually it hit a plateau. And one of the interesting things about these new transformer-based architectures over the last five to 10 years is that we haven't found the end yet.
Coder Radio
589: Blame the Tools using the Tools
So that leads to this dynamic where Llama 3, we could train on 10,000 to 20,000 GPUs. Llama 4, we could train on more than 100,000 GPUs. Llama 5, we can plan to scale even further. And there's just an interesting question of how far that goes. It's totally possible.
Coder Radio
589: Blame the Tools using the Tools
that at some point we just like hit a limit and just like previous systems, there's an asymptote and it doesn't keep on growing, but it's also possible that that limit is not going to happen anytime soon.
Coder Radio
589: Blame the Tools using the Tools
And that we're going to be able to keep on just building more clusters and generating more, you know, synthetic data to train the systems and that they're just going to keep on getting more and more useful for people for quite a while to come. And again,
Coder Radio
589: Blame the Tools using the Tools
It's a really big and high stakes question, I think, for the company is because we're basically making these bets on how much infrastructure to build out for the future. And this is like hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure. So, like, I'm clearly betting that this is going to. keep scaling for a while.
Coder Radio
589: Blame the Tools using the Tools
But it's one of the big questions, I think, in the field, because it is possible that it doesn't. You know, that obviously would lead to a very different world where it's I mean, I'm sure people still figure it out eventually. You just need to make some new fundamental improvements to the architecture in some way.
Coder Radio
589: Blame the Tools using the Tools
But that might be a somewhat longer trajectory for, OK, maybe, you know, the kind of fundamental AI advances slow down for a bit. We just take some time to build new products around this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So that's the kind of full AR, that's the display-less glasses, like all the work we're gonna do on Ray-Ban. And we just announced the expanded partnership with Luxottica. Essilor Luxottica, great company. We've had a great experience working with them. They designed so many great glasses. And I think working with them to do even more is going to be really exciting.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So there's a lot more to do there on all of these things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think it was more of just a kind of commitment from the companies that...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
we're feeling pretty good about how this is going and we're going to build a lot more glasses together part of the way it works is um you know rather than having sort of doing one generation and then designing the next generation i think by having a longer term partnership it allows the teams to not just have to worry about one thing at a time then like okay is this one going to be good and then how do we build on that for the next one now we can start
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
like a multi-year roadmap of many different devices, knowing that we're going to be working together for a long time. So I'm optimistic about that. That's sort of how we work internally, right? We don't just, I mean, sometimes when you're early on, you definitely want to learn from each device launch.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But when there are things that you're committed to, I don't think you want the team to feel like, okay, if we don't get the short-term milestone, then like we're going to cancel the whole thing, right? So... Are you buying a stake in Illusora Luxottica? Yeah. Yeah, I think we've talked about investing in them. It's not going to be a kind of major thing. I'd say it's more of a symbolic thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, we want to have this be a long-term partnership. And as part of that, I thought that this would be kind of a nice gesture. And I fundamentally believe in them a lot. I mean, I think that they're going to go from being the premier glasses company in the world to, I think, one of the major technology companies in the world. I mean, my vision for them and how I think about it
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
is that if you think about how Samsung in Korea made it so that Korea became one of the main hubs of building phones in the world, I think that this is probably one of the best shots for Europe, and Italy in particular, to become a major hub for manufacturing and building and designing the next major category of computing platforms overall. And I think that they're kind of all in on that now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And it's been this interesting question because they have such a good business and such deep competence in the areas. And I've gotten more of an appreciation of how strong of a technology company they are in their own way, right? Designing lenses, designing the materials that you need to make fashionable glasses that... can be light enough, but also kind of like feel good.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
They bring a huge amount that I think is people in kind of our world, the tech world, probably don't necessarily see, but I think that they're really well set up for the future. So I believe in the partnership. I'm really excited about the work that we're doing together. And fundamentally, I think that that's just going to be a massively successful company in the future.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think we collaborate on everything. It's actually, I mean, part of working together is... you kind of build a joint culture over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
There were a lot of really sharp people over there who I think it took maybe a couple versions for us really to gain an appreciation for how each of us approach things because, you know, they really think about things from this like fashion, manufacturing, lens, selling optical devices perspective. And we obviously come at it from a kind of consumer electronics, AI, software perspective, but
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think over time, we just kind of appreciate each other's perspectives on things a lot more. And I mean, I'm like constantly talking to them about things to get their ideas on different things. I mean, but you know, when partnerships are working well, when you reach out to them to get their opinion on things that are not actually currently in the scope of what you're working on together.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And because I do that frequently with Rocco, who runs the wearables and Francesco, who's their CEO. And our team does that too with a large part of the working group over there. It's a good crew. They share good values. They're really sharp. And like I said, I believe in them a lot. And I think it's going to be a very successful partnership and company. We need to take a quick break.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I don't know if we've given a number on that, but... I know, that's what I'm asking. Yeah, it's going very well. One of the things that I think is interesting is we underestimated demand. One thing that is very different in the world of consumer electronics than software is... there are fewer kind of supply constraints in software.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
There are some, I mean, like some of the stuff that we're rolling out, like the voice on Meta AI, we need to meter it as we're rolling it out because we need to make sure we have enough inference capacity to handle it. But fundamentally we'll resolve that in weeks, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But for manufacturing, it's like, you make these concrete decisions like, okay, are we setting up four manufacturing lines or six? Each one, it was a big upfront CapEx investment, and you're basically deciding upfront the velocity at which you're going to be able to generate supply before you know what the demand is. So on this one, we thought that Ray-Ban Meta was probably going to sell...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
three or five times more than the first version did. And we just dramatically underestimated. So now we're in this position where it's actually been somewhat hard for us to gauge what the real demand is because they're sold out and you can't get them. So if you can't get them, then how do you know where the actual curve is? But we're basically getting to the point where that's resolved, where...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
The supply, now we kind of adjusted. We made the decision to build more manufacturing lines. It took some time to do it. They're online now. It's not just about being able to make them. You need to get them into all the stores and get the distribution right. We feel like that's in a pretty good place now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So I'd say over the rest of this year, we're going to start getting a real sense of the demand. But while that's going on, the glasses keep getting better because of over the air AI updates. So the hardware doesn't necessarily change, even though we keep shipping new frames and new type of, you know, they're adding more transitions lenses because people want to wear them indoors.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And that's an interesting thing because I mean, people, Sunglasses are a little more discretionary. So I think a lot more people early on were thinking, hey, I'll experiment with this with sunglasses. I'm not going to make these my primary glasses. Now we're seeing a lot more people say, hey, this is actually really useful. I want to be able to wear them inside.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I want them to be my primary glasses. So whether that's kind of working with them through the optical channel or the transitions, that's an important part. But the AI part of this is also, it just keeps getting better. I mean, we talked about it at Connect. I mean, basically... The ability to now, you know, over the next few months when we roll this out, real-time translations.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
You're traveling abroad, someone's speaking Spanish to you, you just get it translated into English in your ear and just roll out to more and more languages over time. I think we're starting with a few. We'll kind of hit more over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah, Reminders is a new picture.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah, well, I think meta AI is becoming a more and more prominent feature of the classes, right? There's more stuff that you can do. So you just mentioned reminders, another example. It's like now that,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
is just going to work and now your glasses can remind you of things and so okay so you can look at a phone number and say call this phone number and then it calls on the phone you know just we'll just add more capabilities over time and some of that are model updates right so like okay now it has llama 3.2 but some of it is is kind of software development around it like reminders you don't get for free just because we updated the model that's
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
We have this big software development effort, and we're kind of adding features continuously and developing the ecosystem, right? So you get more apps. So Spotify and all these different things kind of can work more natively. So the glasses just get more and more useful, which I think is also going to increase demand over time. And how does it interact with phones?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, like you said, I don't think people are getting rid of phones anytime soon. The way I kind of think about this is that When phones became the primary computing platform, we didn't get rid of computers. We just kind of shifted, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So I don't know if you have this experience, but at some point in the early 2010s, I noticed that I'd be sitting at my desk in front of my computer and I'd just pull out my phone to do things. I think what's going to happen It's not like we're gonna throw away our phones, but I think slowly we're just gonna start doing more things with our glasses and leaving our phones in our pockets more.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And it's not like we're done with our computers and I don't think we're gonna be done with our phones for a while, but there's a pretty clear path where you're just gonna use your glasses for more and more things. Over time, glasses are also going to be able to be powered by wrist-based wearables or other wearables.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So you're going to wake up one day 10 years from now, and you're not even going to need to bring your phone with you. Now, you're still going to have a phone, but I think more of the time people are going to leave it in their pocket or leave it in their bag or eventually even some of the time leave it at home.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And I think there will just be this sort of gradual shift to glasses becoming the main way that we do computing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I agree. I mean, I still think it's early. I think you really want to be able to not just ask the AI questions, but ask it to do things. Yeah. and know that it's going to reliably go do it. And we're starting with simple things, right? So voice control of your glasses, although you can do that on phones too, things like reminders, although you can generally do that on phones too.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think as the model capabilities grow over the next couple of generations and you get more of what people call these agentic capabilities, I think it's gonna start to get pretty exciting. For what it's worth, I also think that all the AI work is gonna make phones a lot more exciting. It's the most exciting thing I think that has happened to our
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
family of apps roadmap in a long time is all of the different AI things that we're building. So if I were at any of the other companies, I think that if I were trying to design what the next few versions of iPhone or Google's phone should be, I think that there's a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can go do with AI that as an app developer, we can't.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So I think that that's a pretty exciting and interesting thing for them to go do, which I assume that they will.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Well, here's how I come at this. So in the history of running the company, where we've been building these apps for 20 years, Every, call it three to five years, there's some new major format that comes along that is typically additive to the experience, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So, you know, initially people kind of updated their profiles, then they were able to post statuses that were text, then links, then you got photos early on, then you added videos, then with mobile. Basically, Snap invented Stories, the first version of that, and that became a pretty kind of widely used format. The whole version of short form videos, I think, is sort of a still ascendant format.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But at each step along the way, you want to... It's like you keep on making the system richer by having more different types of content that people can share and different ways to express themselves.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And when you look out for the next 10 years of, okay, if this trend seems to happen where every three, five years, whatever the pace is, that there are new formats, I think given the pace of change in the tech industry, I think you'd bet that that continues or accelerates. And I think you'd bet that...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
probably most of the new formats are going to be kind of AI connected in some way, given that that's the kind of driving theme for the industry at this point. So given that kind of set of assumptions, we're sort of trying to understand what are the things that are most useful to people within that. There's one vein of this, which is helping people and creators make better content using AI.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
That I think is going to be pretty clear, right? Just make it like super easy for like aspiring creators or advanced creators to make much better stuff than they would be able to otherwise. That can take the format of like, all right, like my daughter is writing a book and she wants it illustrated.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And like we sit down together and work with Meta AI and imagine to help her come up with images to illustrate it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
like okay that's like a thing that's like she didn't have the capability to do that before she's not a graphic designer but now she kind of has that that that ability i think that's going to be pretty cool then i think that there's a version where you have just this great diversity of ai agents that are as part of this system and this i think is a big difference between our vision of ai and most of the other companies is yeah we're building meta ai as kind of the main assistant that you can build
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
that's sort of equivalent to the singular assistant that maybe like a Google or an OpenAI or different folks are building. But it's not really the main thing that we're doing. Our main vision is that we think that there are going to be a lot of these, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
It's every business, all the hundreds of millions of small businesses, you know, just like they have a website and an email address and a social media account today. I think that they're all going to have an AI that helps them interact with their customers in the future that does some combination of sales and customer support and all that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think all the creators are basically going to want some version of this that basically helps them interact with their community when they're just limited by they don't have enough hours in the day to interact with all the messages that are coming in and They want to make sure that they can show some love to people in their community.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And those, I think, are just the two most obvious ones that even if we just did those, that's many hundreds of millions. But then there's going to be all this more creative stuff that's UGC that people create that are kind of wilder use cases that they want. And our view is, okay, these are all going to live across these social networks and beyond. I don't think that they should just...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
be constrained to waiting until someone messages them right i think that they're going to have their own profiles they're going to be creating content people will be able to follow them if they want you'll be able to comment on their stuff they may be able to comment on your stuff if you're connected with them i mean there will obviously be different different logic and rules but that's one way that there's going to be just a lot more kind of ai participants in the
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
broader social construct that we have. And then I think you get to the test that you mentioned, which is maybe the most abstract, which is just having the central meta AI system
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Directly generate content for you based on what we think is gonna be interesting to you and putting that in your feed on that there's been this trend over time where the feed started off as Primarily and exclusively content for people you you followed friends I guess it was friends early on then it kind of broadened out to okay you followed a set of friends and creators and then
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
It got to a point where the algorithm was good enough where we're actually showing you a lot of stuff that you're not following directly because in some ways that's a better way to show you more interesting stuff than only constraining it to things that you've chosen to follow.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think the next logical jump on that is like, okay, we're showing you content from your friends and creators that you're following and creators that you're not following that are generating interesting things. And you just add on to that a layer of, okay, and we're also going to show you content that's generated by an AI system that might be something that you're interested in.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Now, how big do any of these segments get? I think it's really hard to know until you build them out over time. It feels like it is a category in the world that's going to exist. And how big it gets is kind of dependent on the execution and how good it is.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Well, I think the main difference... And that feels big. Yeah, but in a lot of ways, the big change already happened, which is people getting content that they weren't following. And the definition of feeds and social interaction has changed very fundamentally in the last 10 years. Now, in social systems...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Most of the direct interaction is happening in more private forums and messaging our groups. This is one of the reasons I think why we were late with Reels initially to competing with TikTok is because we hadn't made this mental shift where we kind of felt like, no, feed is where you interact with people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Actually, increasingly, feed is becoming a place where you discover content that you then take to your private forums and interact with people there. So a lot of the way that I interact with people, it's like, yeah, I'll still have the thing where A friend will post something and I'll comment on it and engage directly in feed. Again, this is additive. You're adding more over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But the main way that you engage with Reels isn't necessarily that you go into the Reels comments and comment and talk to people you don't know. It's like you see something funny and you send it to friends in a group chat. I think that that paradigm will absolutely continue with AI and all kinds of interesting content. So it is facilitating connections with people, but...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
i think already we're in this mode where our connections through social media are shifting to more private places and the role of feed in the ecosystem is more as a you know i call it a discovery engine of content to kind of you know icebreakers or interesting kind of topic starters for the conversations that you're having across this like broader spectrum of places where you're interacting
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, the sociology that I've seen on this is that most people have way fewer friends physically than they would like to have. I think people cherish the kind of human connection that they have.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And the more we can do to make that feel more real and give you more reasons to connect, whether it's through something funny that shows up so you can message someone or a pair of glasses that lets your sister show up as a hologram in your living room when she lives across the country and you wouldn't be able to see her otherwise.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
That's always kind of our main bread and butter in the thing that we're doing. But in addition to that, I mean, if the, you know, the average person, I think, you know, maybe they'd like to have 10 friends. And I mean, there's the stat that it's like, it's sort of sad, but I think the average American feels like they have fewer than three, like real kind of close friends. So.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Does this take away from that? My guess is no. I think that what's going to happen is it's going to help give people more of the support that they need and give people more kind of reasons and ability to connect with either a broader range of people or more deeply with the people that they care about. We need to take another quick break.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, Threads on fire. It's great. I mean, these things, it's like, there's only so quickly that something can get to a billion people. So it's going to, you know, we'll kind of keep on pushing on it over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, I think that these things all connect to each other. I mean, I think threads helps Instagram. I think Instagram helps threads. I don't know that we have some strategic goal, which is like make it so that threads is completely disconnected from Instagram or Facebook. I actually think we're going the other direction.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
It started off just connected to Instagram and now we also connected it so that the content can show up. You know, taking a step back, I mean, we just talked about how for most people, they're interacting in more private forums. If you're a creator, what you want to do is have your content show up everywhere, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Because you're trying to build the biggest community that you can in these different places. So it's this huge value for people if they can generate a reel or a video or some text-based content, and now you can post it in threads, Instagram, Facebook, and more places over time. So I think the direction there is generally kind of more flow, not less, and kind of more interoperability.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And that's why I've been kind of pushing on that as a theme over time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. There are different ways to look at this. I always looked at Twitter not as primarily about real-time news, but as a kind of short-form, primarily text, discussion-oriented app. To me, the fundamental defining aspect of that format is that... When you make a post, the comments aren't subordinate to the post.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
The comments are kind of at a peer level, and that is a very different architecture than every other type of social network that's out there. It's a subtle difference, but within these systems, these subtle differences lead to very different emerging behaviors. So because of that, people can take, they can fork discussions, and it makes it a very good discussion-oriented platform.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Now, news is one thing that people like discussing, but it's not the only thing. And I always looked at Twitter and I was like, hey, this is such a wasted opportunity. Like, this is clearly a billion-person app. You know, maybe in the modern day when you have multiple, like, many billions of people using social apps, it should be multiple billions of people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
For whatever reason, I mean, there are a lot of things that have been complicated about Twitter and the corporate structure and all that, but they just weren't quite getting there. And eventually... I kind of thought, hey, I think we can do this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think we can get this, build out the discussion platform in a way that can get to a billion people and be more of a ubiquitous social platform that I think achieves its full potential. But our version of this is we want it to be a kinder place. We don't want it to start with kind of the direct kind of head-to-head combat of news and especially politics. And
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, I think we'll see.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah, well, we're not the only company. There are a ton of different competitors and different companies doing things. And I think that there's a talented team over at Twitter and X and I wouldn't write them off. And then obviously there's all these other folks, there's a lot of startups that are doing stuff. So I don't feel like we have to go at that first.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think that maybe we get there over time or maybe we decide that it's enough of a zero sum trade or maybe even a negative sum trade where like that use case should exist somewhere, but maybe that use case prevents a lot more usage and kind of a lot more value in other places because it makes it a somewhat less friendly place.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I don't think we know the answer to that yet, but I do think the last 10 years eight years of our experience has been that the political discourse, it's tricky, right? It's on the one hand, it's obviously a very important thing in society. And on the other hand, I don't think it leaves people feeling good. So I'm torn between these two values.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
On the one hand, I think like people should be able to have this kind of open discourse and that's good. On the other hand, I don't want to design a product that makes people angry. There's an informational lens for looking at this, and you're designing a product, and what's the feel of the product? I think anyone who's designing a product cares a lot about how the thing feels. And
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think it's useful. And look, we don't block it. We just make it so that for the content where you're following people, if you want to talk to your friends about it, if you want to talk to them about it in messaging, there can be groups about it. If you follow people, it can show up in your feed. But we don't go out of our way to recommend that content when you're not following it. And...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think that that has been a healthy balance for us and for getting our products to generally feel the way that we want. And, you know, culture changes over time. Maybe this stuff will be like a little bit less polarized and anger inducing at some point. And maybe it'll be possible to have more of that. while also at the same time having a product where we're proud of how it feels.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But until then, I think we want to design a product that, yeah, people can get the things that they want. But, you know, fundamentally, I care a lot about how people feel coming away from the products.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, I'm sure it's all connected. I think in this case, it wasn't a trade-off between those two things because this actually was what our community was telling us. And people were saying, generally, we don't want so much politics. Like, this isn't, you know, like, we don't feel good. Like, we want content. We want more stuff from our friends and family. We want more stuff from our interests.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
That was kind of the primary driver. But I think it's definitely the case that our corporate experience on this shaped this. And... I mean, there's a big difference between something being political and being partisan.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And the main thing that I care about is making sure that we can be seen as a nonpartisan and, you know, as much as something can in the world in 2024 be sort of like a trusted institution by as many people as possible. And I just think that the partisan politics is so tough in the world right now that...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I've made the decision that I kind of feel like for me and for the company, best thing to do is to try to be as nonpartisan as possible in all of this and kind of be as neutral and distance ourselves as much as possible. And it's not just the substance. I also think the perception matters.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So I think, so that's why, you know, and maybe, you know, it doesn't matter on our platforms whether I endorse a candidate or not, but like, I don't even, I don't want to go anywhere near that. And yeah, sure. I mean, you could say that's a political strategy, but I think it's, you know, I think for where we are in the world today, it's very hard.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Almost every institution has become partisan in some way. And we are just trying to resist that. And maybe I'm too naive and maybe that's impossible, but we're going to try to do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I'm just talking about where our brand is and our reputation are compared to where I think they would have been. I mean, there's no doubt that even now here in, okay, yeah, sure, maybe things have improved somewhat over the last few years, you can feel the trend, but it's still significantly worse than it was in 2016.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
You know, it's, I mean, the internet industry overall, and I think our company in particular, just we're seeing way more positively. And Now, look, there were real issues, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So I think that it's always very difficult to talk about this stuff in a nuanced way because I think to some degree before 2016, everyone was sort of too rosy about the internet overall and didn't talk enough about the issues. And then the pendulum sort of swung and people only talked about the issues and didn't talk about the stuff that was positive. And it was all both there the whole time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So when I talk about this, I don't mean to come across as simplistic or...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Or that there weren't issues with the internet or things like that. I mean, obviously every year, whether it's politics or other things, there are always things that you look back at and you're like, hey, yeah, if I were playing this perfectly, I would have done these things differently.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But I do think it's the case that I didn't really know how to react to something as big of a shift in the world as what happened. And it took me a while to find my footing. And I do think that it's tricky when you're caught up in these kind of big debates. you're not kind of experienced or sophisticated in engaging with that, I think you can make some big missteps.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And I do think that some of the things that we were accused of over time, it just, you know, I think it's just been pretty clear at this point, you know, now that all the investigations have been done that, like, they... they weren't true.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think Cambridge Analytica is a good example of something that it's like, people thought that like all this data had been taken and that it had been used in this campaign. And it turns out it wasn't like it wasn't like in the, yeah. So it's like all the stuff. Okay. And like the data wasn't even, you know,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
accessible to the to the developer and we'd fix the issue like five years ago so in the moment it was like really hard for us to to kind of have a rational discussion about that and i mean part of the challenge is that you know for the general population i think a lot of people they read the initial headlines and they don't necessarily read the um
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And frankly, a lot of the media I don't think was as loud to write about when all the investigations concluded that said that a lot of the initial allegations were just completely wrong. So I think that's a real thing. So okay, so you take these hits. I didn't really know how to kind of push back on that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And maybe some of it you can't, but I like to think that I think we could have played some of this stuff differently. And I do think it was certainly the case that when you take responsibility for things that are not your...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
fault you become sort of a weak target for people who are looking to blame other things and find a target for them it's sort of like this is a different part of of it's it's somewhat related to this but when you think about like like litigation strategy for the company
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
One of the reasons why I hate settling lawsuits is that it basically sends a signal to people that, hey, this is a company that settles lawsuits, so maybe we can sue them and they'll settle lawsuits.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
No, I think the right kind of...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
way to approach this is when you believe in something you fight really hard for it and i think this is a repeat game this isn't like this it's not like there's a single issue and we're going to be around for a long time and i think it's it's really important that people know that we're a company that has conviction and that we we believe in what we're doing and we're going to back that up and defend ourselves and i think that that kind of sets the right tone now
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think over the next 10 years, I think we're sort of digging ourselves back to neutral on this. But I like to think that if we hadn't had a lot of these issues, we would have made progress over the last 10 years, too. So I sort of give it this timeframe. Maybe 20 years is too long. Maybe it's 15. But it's hard to know with politics.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
that i think is the next big fight and and on that you know i think a lot of the data on this i i think is just not where the narrative is the narrative yeah i think the narrative is a lot of people sort of take it as if it's like an assumed thing that there's some link and like i think the majority of the of the high quality research that's out there suggests that there's no causal connection like a kind of a broad scale between between these things so
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
no look i mean i think that that's different from saying like in any given issue like was is someone bullied should we try to stop bullying yeah of course but yeah overall i think that this is this is one where there are a bunch of these cases i think that there will be a lot of litigation around them and it's one where we're trying to make sure that the academic research that shows something that i think is you know it um
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
To me, it sort of foots more with what I've seen of how the platforms operate, but it's counter to what a lot of people think. And I think that that's going to be a reckoning that we'll have to have is basically when as the kind of the majority of the high quality academic research gets shown is like, okay, can people accept this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think a lot of it goes all the way back to our relationship with mobile platforms and all that. We have lived through one major platform transition already because we started on web, not on mobile. Mobile phones and smartphones kind of got started around the same time. as Facebook and kind of early social media was getting started.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And I think that's going to be a really important set of debates over the next
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah. And I think this is an interesting part of the balance is, um, you can play a role in trying to make something better even if the thing wasn't caused by you in the first place there's no doubt that being a parent is really hard and there's a big question of in this internet age where we have phones what are the right tools that parents need in order to be able to
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
raise their kids and like i think that we can play a role in giving people controls over parental controls over the apps i think the parental controls are also really important because parents have different ways that they want to raise their kids or just like schooling and education people have like very significantly different local preferences for how they want to raise their kids i don't think that most people want some internet company setting all the rules for this either so
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Obviously, when there are laws passed, we'll kind of follow the government's direction and the laws on that. But I actually think the right approach for us is to primarily kind of align with parents to give them the tools that they want to be able to raise their kids in the way that they want. And some people are going to think that more technology use is good.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
That's sort of how my parents raised me growing up. I think it worked pretty well. Some people are going to want to limit it more, and we want to give them the tools to be able to do that. But I don't think that this is primarily or only a social media thing. Even the parts of this that are technology... age verification. I think phones, like the phone platforms have a huge part of this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, it's, yeah, I mean, there's this big question of how do you do age verification? And I mean, I can tell you what the easiest way is, which is like, all right, like every time you go do a payment on your phone, I mean, there already is child, you know, basically like child age verification. So I don't really understand.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Well, I guess I understand, but I think it's, it's, it's not very, you know, excusable from my perspective, why Apple and, and, and I guess to some extent, Google don't want to just extend the age verification that they already have on their phones to be a parental control for parents to basically be able to say, you know, what apps can my kids use?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think they don't want to take responsibility.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to do our part and we're going to build the tools that we can for parents and for teens. But at the end of the day, and look, I'm not saying it's all the phone's fault either. Although I would say that like the ability to get push notifications and get kind of distracted is, from my perspective, seems like a much greater contributor to mental health issues than parents.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
than kind of a lot of the specific apps. But there are things that I think everyone should kind of try to improve and work on. But yeah, I mean, that's sort of my view on all that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So it didn't really get to play any role in that platform transition, but going through it where we weren't born on mobile, we kind of had this awareness that, okay, web was a thing. Mobile is a thing. It is different. There are strengths and weaknesses of it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah. I don't know. It's a little hard for me to parse the European politics. I have a hard time enough with American politics. I mean, I'm American. But in theory, my understanding of the way this is supposed to work is they kind of passed... GDPR regulation.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And you're supposed to have this idea of sort of a one-stop shop, like home regulator, who can basically, on behalf of the whole EU, interpret and enforce the rules. We have our European headquarters, and we work with that regulator. And I think they're like, okay, they're pretty tough on us and pretty firm.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But at least when you're working with one regulator, you can kind of understand how are they thinking about things and you can make progress. And the thing that I think has been tricky is there have been, from my perspective, a little bit of a backslide where now you get all these other DPAs across the continent sort of also intervening and trying to do things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And it just seems like more of an kind of internal EU political thing, which is like, okay, do they want to have this one-stop shop and have clarity for companies so companies can kind of like can execute or, or do they just want it to be this kind of very complicated regulatory system?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And I look, I think that's for them to sort out, but I know there's no doubt that when you have like dozens of different regulators that can ask you kind of the same questions about different things, it makes it a much more difficult environment to build things. Do you, do you understand that's just us? I think that that's all the companies.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah. I mean, I think that in any new medium in technology, there's the concepts around fair use and where are the boundaries between what you have control over. When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get you know, relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
There's this continuum of computing where now you have a mobile device that you can take with you all the time, and that's amazing, but it's small. kind of pulls you away from other interactions. Those things are not great, but there was sort of this recognition that just like there was the transition from computers to mobile, mobile was not going to be the end of the line.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So, I mean, I get it. I think that these are important questions. I think this is not like a completely novel thing to AI in the grand scheme of things. I think it was, you know, a lot of them, there were questions about it with the internet overall too, and with different technologies over time. But I think getting to clarity on that is going to be important.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So that way, the things that society wants people to build, they can go build.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I mean, I think it starts with having some framework of like, okay, what's the process going to be for working through that?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think that there's a lot of different possibilities for how stuff goes in the future. Now, I do think that there's this issue, which is a lot of like, well, psychologically, I understand what you're saying. Yeah. I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content. So it's like, okay, maybe in the grand scheme of this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So we have this set of challenges with news publishers around the world, which is like, okay, a lot of folks are constantly kind of asking, to be paid for the content. And on the other hand, we have our community, which is asking us to show less news because it makes them feel bad, right? And I mean, we talked about that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So it's like, there's this issue, which is, okay, it's like, actually, we're showing some amount of the news that we're showing because we think it's socially important against what our community wants. Like if we were actually just following what our community wants, we'd show even less than we're showing. And you see that in the data that people just don't like to engage with this stuff.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And we've had these issues where sometimes we, Like publishers say, okay, if you're not going to pay us, then pull our content down. And it's just like, yeah, sure. Fine. Pull, pull your content down. I mean, that sucks. I'd rather people be able to share it. But to some degree, some of these questions have to get tested by their negotiations and they have to get tested by people walking. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And then at the end, once people walk, you figure out where the value really is. If it really is the case that news was a big thing that the community wanted, then, I mean, look, we're a big company. We could probably, you know, we pay for content when it's valuable to people. We're just not going to pay for content when it's not valuable to people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
i think that you'll probably see a similar dynamic with ai which is my guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable and i'd guess that there's probably a lot of people who kind of have a concern about like the feel of it like you're saying but then when push comes to shove if they demanded that we take that we don't use their content then we just wouldn't use their content and it's not like you know that's going to change the outcome of the stuff that much
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think that's going to be another platform too, and you're going to have a lot of these questions as well. I mean, I think the interesting thing about holograms and augmented reality is it's going to be this intermingling of the physical and digital much more than we've had in other platforms.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Where on your phone, it's like, okay, yeah, we live a primarily physical world, but then you have this small window into this digital world. And I think we're going to basically have this world in the future that is...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So as soon as we started becoming like a more, I don't know, I guess I'd say stable company, like once we found our footing on mobile and
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
increasingly you know call it half physical half digital or i don't know 60 physical 40 digital and it's like going to be blended together and i think that there are going to be a lot of interesting governance questions around that right in terms of is kind of all of the digital stuff that's overlaid physically going to fit within sort of a physical kind of national
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
regulation perspective or is it sort of is it actually coming from a different world or something you know and i think these will all be very interesting questions that we will have a perspective i'm sure we're not going to be right about every single thing i think like the world will kind of need to sort out where it wants to be different countries will have different values and take somewhat different approaches on things and i think that that's it's part of the interesting process of this the tapestry of how it all gets built is like you need to work through so that it ends up being positive for
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
you know, as many of the possible stakeholders as possible.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
we weren't like clearly going to go out of business or something like that i was like okay let's start planting some seeds for what we think could be the future right it's like mobile is already kind of getting defined you know by 2012 2014-ish it was generally too late to to really shape that platform in a meaningful way i mean we had some experiments i mean they didn't succeed or go anywhere
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So pretty quickly I was like, okay, we should focus on the future because just like there's the shift from desktop to mobile, new things are going to be possible in the future. So what is that? I think the kind of simplest version of it is basically what you started seeing with Orion, right? It's like the vision is a normal pair of glasses. that can do two really fundamental things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
One is put holograms in the world to deliver this realistic sense of presence, like you were there with another person or in another place, or maybe you're physically with a person, but just like we did, you can pull up a virtual pong game or whatever. You can work on things together. You can sit at a coffee shop, pull up your whole workstation of different monitors.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
You can be on a flight or in the backseat of a car and pull up a full-screen movie theater and like, okay, all these things. Great computing, full sense of presence, like you're there with people no matter where they are. Thing two is it's the ideal device for AI. And the reason for that is because glasses are sort of uniquely positioned
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
For you to be able to let them see what you see and hear what you hear and give you very subtle feedback back to you where they can speak in your ear or they can have silent input that kind of shows up on the glasses that other people can't see and doesn't take you away from the world around you. And I think that that is all going to be really profound.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
When we got started with this, I had thought that kind of the hologram part of this was going to be possible before AI. So it's sort of an interesting twist of fate that the AI part is actually possible before the holograms are really able to be mass produced at kind of an affordable price. But that was sort of the vision. I think that it's pretty easy to wrap your head around
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And there's already a billion to two billion people who wear glasses on a daily basis. Just like everyone who didn't have smartphones were kind of the first people to upgrade to smartphones. I think everyone who has glasses is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade. And then I think it's going to start being really valuable.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And a lot of other people who aren't wearing glasses today are going to end up wearing them too. That's kind of the simple version. And then I think as we've developed this out, there are all these sort of more nuanced directions that have emerged too.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So we've started, you know, while that was kind of the full version of what we wanted to build, there were all these things that we said, okay, well, maybe it's really hard to build normal looking glasses that can do holograms at an affordable price point. So what parts of that can we take on? And that's where we did the partnership with SLR Luxottica. So it's like, okay, before you have a display,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
You can get normal looking glasses that can have a camera, that can have a microphone, great audio, can capture content. You can stream video at this point, but the most important feature at this point is the ability to access meta AI and just kind of have kind of a full AI there, multimodal because it has camera. And I mean, that product is starting at $300.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And, you know, initially I kind of thought, hey, this is sort of on the technology path to building full holographic glasses. At this point, I actually just think both are going to exist long-term, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think that there are going to be people who want the full holographic glasses, and I think that there are going to be people who prefer kind of the superior form factor or lower price of a device where they are primarily optimizing for getting AI. I also think there's going to be a range of things in between, right? So there's the full kind of field of view that you just saw, right? 70 degrees.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
really wide field of view for glasses. But I think that there are other products in between that too. There's like a heads-up display version. You know, for that, you probably just need, you know, 20, 30 degrees. You can't do kind of the full kind of world holograms where you're interacting with things.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Like you're not going to play ping pong in 30-degree field of view, but you can communicate with AI. You can text your friends. You can get directions. You can... see the content that you're capturing. So I know there's a lot there that's going to be compelling. And that's, I think, going to be
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
At each step along this continuum, from displayless to small display to kind of full holographic, you're packing more technology in. So each step up is going to be a little more expensive, is going to have a little more constraints on the form factor, even though I think we'll get them all to be attractive. You'll be able to do the kind of simpler ones and much smaller form factors permanently.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And then, of course, there's the mixed reality headsets, which kind of took a different direction, which is going towards the same vision, but... On that, we said, okay, well, we're not going to try to fit it into a glasses form factor. For that one, we're going to say, okay, we're going to really go for all the compute that we want.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And we're going to say, okay, this is going to be more of like a headset or goggles form factor. And my guess is that that's going to be a thing long-term too, because there are a bunch of uses where people want the full immersion. And if you're sitting at your desk and working for a long period of time, you might want the more computing power than you're going to be able to get.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But I think that there's no doubt that Kind of what you saw with Orion is the, I think, kind of quintessential vision of what people, what at least kind of I thought and continue to think is going to be the next multi-billion person major computing platform. And then kind of all these other things are going to get built out around it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah, yeah. Orion was meant to be our first consumer product. And we weren't sure if we were going to be able to pull it off. I mean, in general, it's probably turned out significantly better than our kind of 50-50 estimates of what it would be. But we didn't get there on everything that we wanted to.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I think we still want it to be a little smaller, a little brighter, like a little bit higher resolution, and a lot more affordable. Before we kind of put it out there as a product. And look, we have line of sight to all those things. So I think we'll probably have the thing that was going to be the V2 end up being the consumer product.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And we're going to use Orion with developers to basically cultivate the software experience. That way, by the time we're ready to ship something, it's going to be much more dialed in.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
I always want to ship stuff quickly and all that. But I think it was the right thing. On this product, there's a pretty clear set of constraints that I think you want to hit.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
especially around the form factor, right? I mean, it is very helpful for us that sort of chunkier glasses are kind of ascendant in the fashion world because that allows us to build glasses that are gonna be fashionable, but also tech forward. But even so, I'd say, you know, these are unmistakably glasses They're reasonably comfortable. They're, you know, under 100 grams.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah, but I mean, I think we aspire to building things that like look really good, right? And I think this is like good glasses, but I want it to be a little smaller so it can fit within like really fashionable, right? When people see the Ray-Bans, there's no compromise on fashion. It's like part of why I think people like them
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
is, yeah, you get all this functionality, but even when you're not using it, they're great glasses. And I think for the future version of Orion, that's the target too. We want to make it so that, you know, most of the time you're going through your day, you're not computing, right? Or something is happening in the background or something.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
So it just needs to be good in order for you to kind of want to keep it on your face. And I feel like we're almost there. I think we've made more progress than anyone else in the world that I'm aware of, but it didn't quite hit my bar. And similarly... On price, these are going to be more expensive than the Ray-Bans, right? I mean, there's just a lot more tech that's going in them.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But, you know, we do want to have it be within a consumer price point. This was outside that range. So I wanted to wait until we could get to that range in order to have something that we ship.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
We are using this as a developer kit, just primarily internally and maybe with a handful of partners. Okay. But, I mean, I think at this point, meta is by far the... kind of premier developer of augmented reality and virtual and mixed reality software and hardware in the world. So you can think about it as a developer kit, but we just have a lot of that talent in-house.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
And then we also have well-developed partnerships with a lot of folks externally who we can go to and work with them as well. So I don't think we need to go announce a dev kit that kind of arbitrary developers can go buy to get access to the talent that we need to go build out the platform. I think we're kind of in a place where we can work with partners and do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
But that's absolutely what we're going to do over the next few years. hone the experience and figure out what we need to do to really nail it when it's ready to ship.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to end the smartphone era
Yeah, probably. Yeah. But I mean, overall... for reality labs. For a while, a lot of people thought of all of that budget is going towards virtual and mixed reality. And I actually think we've said publicly that our glasses programs are a bigger budget than our virtual and mixed reality programs. But that goes across all of them, right?
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created.
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it's gone too far.
Morning Wire
Meta Curbs Censorship & Trump's Second Term Plans | 1.8.25
We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
Morning Wire
Jack Smith Report Blocked & Congestion Toll Avoidance | Afternoon Update | 1.7.25
After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S.,
Pod Save America
Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
I think you start one of these if you care about giving people a voice. I wasn't too deep on our content policies for like the first 10 years of the company. It was just kind of well known across the company that we were trying to give people the ability to share as much as possible. I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath,
Pod Save America
Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, okay, there's no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation. People just felt like the fact checkers were too biased. I don't know. It's something out of like, you know, 1984, one of these books where it's just like, it really is a slippery slope.
Pod Save America
Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
And it just got to a point where it's just, okay, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States to have this program. If the US tech industry is going to continue being really strong, I do think that the US government has a role in basically defending it abroad. And that's one of the things that I'm optimistic about will happen in this administration.
Pod Save America
Will the GOP Hold Disaster Relief Hostage?
Just, I think a lot of the corporate world is like pretty culturally neutered. There's something, the kind of masculine energy I think is good. I think having a culture that like celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive. Just like having a thing that I can just like do with my guy friends and like, And we just beat each other a bit. It's good. It is good.
Pod Save the UK
Billionaire BS: How can Britain Stop Musk’s Disinformation?
So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
Pod Save the UK
Billionaire BS: How can Britain Stop Musk’s Disinformation?
So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
Well, you know, I'm optimistic, but I'm an entrepreneur. You don't go off and try to build something crazy if you're not optimistic fundamentally about the world.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
I mean, I've only encountered people who seem like they have good intentions and want to move this forward and care about the people in their districts. And what we're trying to do with Forward.Us is, I mean, obviously we're not writing the law, right? I mean, all these folks know way more about the sensitivities than we do.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
We just want to be there to help support folks who are going to have to take challenging positions on something that's going to be controversial, but they ultimately believe is the right thing. So that's why we're here and what we're going to try to do to help out.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
Chairman Grassley, Chairman Thune, Ranking Member Feinstein and Ranking Member Nelson and members of the committee.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
We face a number of important issues around privacy, safety, and democracy. And you will rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
Senator, yes, there will always be a version of Facebook that is free. It is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and to bring the world closer together. In order to do that, we believe that we need to offer a service that everyone can afford, and we're committed to doing that.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
Joe learns about a zombie hunting VR game he might like. My zombie game is Arizona Sunshine.
Search Engine
The New Zuckerberg
Oh, it's, you just like, it can be multiplayer and there's horde mode where you just get in there and...
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The New Zuckerberg
I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of COVID. It seemed like, okay, you have this virus. It seems like it's killing a lot of people. I don't know. We didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be. So at the beginning, it kind of seemed like, okay, we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this.
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The New Zuckerberg
First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S.,
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The New Zuckerberg
But when it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve to, you know, and like in the beginning it was like, okay, there aren't enough masks, masks aren't that important, to then it's like, oh, no, you have to wear a mask. And, you know, like everything was shifting around. It just became very difficult to kind of follow. And this really hit the most extreme, I'd say, during...
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The New Zuckerberg
It was during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. And I'm generally like pretty pro rolling out vaccines. I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative. I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it.
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The New Zuckerberg
And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true, right? I mean, they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down. And I was just like, well, we're not going to do that. Like, we're clearly not going to do that. I mean, that is kind of inarguably true.
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The New Zuckerberg
And since then, I think generally trust in media has fallen off a cliff, right? So I don't think I'm alone in that journey. I think that's basically the experience that a lot of people have had is, okay, the stuff that's being written about is not kind of all accurate. And even if the facts are right, it's kind of written from a slant a lot of the time. Of course. And then...
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The New Zuckerberg
And then there was the government version of it, which is during COVID, which is okay. It's like our government is telling us that we need to censor true things. It's like, this is a disaster.
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The New Zuckerberg
We're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.
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The New Zuckerberg
So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
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The New Zuckerberg
Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
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The New Zuckerberg
But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
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The New Zuckerberg
I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there and more to come soon.
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The New Zuckerberg
Sure. So... I mean, privacy is a really important issue for us and for the Internet. So we spend a lot of time thinking about these things. In terms of the settings that we have, I think that there are some misperceptions.
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The New Zuckerberg
Yeah, I mean... They cut to a very close close-up of his face. He looks like a teenager pulled over for a DUI. You can see the beads of sweat collecting. I can't go back and change the past.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, we basically just reached a point where we pushed back on all this stuff, right? So they were pushing us to censor stuff. We were unwilling to do it. We developed a very adversarial and bad relationship with our own government, which I think is just not healthy because I think, you know, it's... I mean, in...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
In theory, I think, you know, it would be good if the American industry had a positive relationship with the American government. But then what that happened is then the kind of U.S. government was going after us in all these ways. But fortunately in the U.S., you know, we have good rule of law.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So our view is at the end of the day, OK, these agencies can open up investigations and we'll just defend ourselves. We'll go to court and we'll win all the cases because we're We follow the rules. And so I think it ends up being.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
a big kind of political issue where it's like it would just be you could get a lot more done if the government were helping american companies rather than kind of slowing you down at every step along the way it makes you a little afraid that if you ever actually mess something up that they're really going to bring the hammer down on you if you don't have a constructive relationship but um
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But I don't know. It's mostly I mean, going back to the AI conversation, it's like I just think like we should all want the American companies to win at this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like this is like a huge geopolitical competition and like China is running at it super hard. And like we should want the American companies in the American standard to win. And like if there's going to be an open source model that everyone uses like. We should want it to be an American model. There's this great Chinese model that just came out, this company DeepSeek.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
They're doing really good work. It's a very advanced model. And if you ask it for any negative opinions about Xi Jinping, it will not give you anything. If you ask it if Tiananmen Square happened, it will deny it. So I think there are all these things where we should want the American model to win. But every step along the way,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
if the government is sort of making that harder rather than easier, then that's, I don't know. I mean, there's, there's an extent to which, okay, the American tech industry is leading. So maybe the government can like get in the way a little bit and maybe the American industry will still lead, but I don't know. It's, I think it's getting really competitive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think like it's easy for the government to take for granted that the U S will lead on all these things when I think it's a very close competition and we need the help, not, you know, we need them to not kind of like, You know, be a force that's helping us to do these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And since then, I think generally trust in media has fallen off a cliff, right? So I don't think I'm alone in that journey. I think that's basically the experience that a lot of people have had is, okay, the stuff that's being written about is not kind of all accurate. And even if the facts are right, it's kind of written from a slant a lot of the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And some of this is just, you know, if you go back to the COVID example, I think in that case, they were doing something. Their goal of trying to get everyone to get vaccinated was actually, I think, a good goal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. But but also even but even if it were right, it's like if I mean, I think that still unbalanced, knowing everything that we know now, I still think it's good for more people to get the vaccine. But the government still needs to play by the rules in terms of, you know, not like you can't just suppress true things in order to make your case. So I that's that's kind of my.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
My view on it is I'm not sure in that case how much of it was like a personal political gain that they were going for. I think that they had a kind of goal that they thought was in the interests of the country. And the way they went about it, I think, violated the law.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
tension with the American government. I guess just the point that I'd underscore is that it's important to have this working in the American government because it is like the U.S. Constitution and like our culture here is really good compared to a lot of other places. Right. So whatever issues we think might exist here. you go to other places and it's like really extreme. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And you don't even, and there it's like, you don't even necessarily have the rule of law.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Right. And, um, so I just think that like the way that this stuff works well is, yeah, I think if, if, if there was a clearer strategy and the U S government understood, believe that it's good to kind of help advance this industry because it's strategically important for the country, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And then... And then there was the government version of it, which is during COVID, which is okay. It's like our government is telling us that we need to censor true things. It's like, this is a disaster. And it's not just the U.S., right? I think a lot of people in the U.S., focus on this as an American phenomenon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
then I think it would be good to basically push back on stuff that's happening in other countries that's actually a lot more extreme than the stuff that's happening in the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, how long have we been going for? Three hours. Yeah, I mean, well, I feel like we touched on AI. We touched on all the augmented and virtual reality stuff. And I think that that stuff is just going to be Wild.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Did you get a chance to use the Ray-Bans and the AI in them?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like the Ray-Bans are like, okay, given a good-looking pair of glasses, what's all the technology you can put into that today and still have it be just a few hundred dollars? And then the Orion thing is like, all right, we're building the kind of future thing that we want, and we're doing our best to miniaturize it. It's basically like— Still pretty small.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. And I think we want it to be a little smaller. We need to be a lot cheaper, right? Each pair right now costs more than $10,000 to make. And you're not going to have a successful consumer product at that. So we have to miniaturize it more. But I mean, the amount of stuff that we put in there from... It's like effectively...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It would have been considered a supercomputer like 10 or 20 years ago. Plus, you know, lasers in the arms and the like nano etchings on the on the lens to be able to see it. And then the microphone and the speaker and the Wi-Fi to be able to connect to the other. It's just like like a wild amount of technology to kind of miniaturize into something. That one's really fun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
We've been working on that for 10 years. Um, but yeah, no, I think, I think between that, the glasses, um, all the AI stuff, um, yeah, all the social media stuff. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. I think the more voice is the answer on this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think after sort of a long journey, I'm glad to be able to take it back to the roots. And I feel like we're more fortified now in the position.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But I kind of think that the reaction to COVID probably caused a breakdown in trust in a lot of governments around the world. Because, I mean, 2024 was a big election year around the world. And, you know, there are all these countries, India, just like a ton of countries that had elections. And the incumbents basically lost every single one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, look, I think going back to the beginning, or like I was saying, I think you start one of these if you care about giving people a voice. You know, I wasn't too deep on our content policies for like the first 10 years of the company. It was just kind of well known across the company that we were trying to give people the ability to share as much as possible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So there is some sort of a global phenomenon where the – whether it was because of inflation, because of the economic policies to deal with COVID or just how the government's dealt with COVID – seems to have had this effect that's global, not just the U.S., but like a very broad decrease in trust, at least in that set of incumbents and maybe in sort of these democratic institutions overall.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I think that what you're saying of, yeah, how do people get their information now? It's by sharing it online on social media. I think that that's just increasingly true. And my view at this point is like, all right, like we started off focused on free expression. We kind of had this pressure tested over the last period.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I feel like I just have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be. And like, this is how it's going to be going forward. And and so I mean, at this point, I think I think a lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing, you know, because they they kind of look at the timing and they're like, hey, well, you're doing this right after the election.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, OK, I try not to change our content rules like right in the middle of an election either. Right. It's like there's not like a great time to do this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, it's like there's no good time to do it. Whatever time is going on, there's going to be... The good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this kind of cultural pulse as like, okay, where are people right now and how are people thinking about it? We try to have policies that reflect mainstream discourse. But Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I think that this is going to be pretty durable because at this point, we've just been pressure tested on this stuff for like the last eight to 10 years with like these huge institutions just pressuring us. And I feel like this is kind of the right place to be going forward. What was it like?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And issues would come up, practical issues, right? So if someone's getting bullied, for example, we deal with that, or we put in place systems to fight bullying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
You know, if someone is saying, hey, you know, someone's pirating copyrighted content on the service, it's like, OK, we'll build controls to make it so we'll find IP protected content. But it was really in the last 10 years that people started pushing for ideological-based censorship. And I think it was two main events that really triggered this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, when you say someone's coming after you, are you referring to kind of the government and investigations and all that? I mean, so the issue is that there's the... There's what specific thing an agency might be looking into you for. And then there's like the underlying political motivation, which is like, why do the people who are running this thing hate you?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think that those can often be two very different things. So, and we had organizations... that were looking into us that were not really involved with social media, like the CFPB, like this financial, I don't even know what it stands for. It's the financial organization that Elizabeth Warren had set up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, so we're not a bank, right? It's like, what does Meta have to do with this? But they kind of found some theory that they wanted to investigate. And it's like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard to find some theory. But it like, I don't know, it just it kind of like throughout the...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
The party and the government, there's just sort of – I don't know if it's – I don't know how this stuff works. I mean, I've never been in government. I don't know if it's like a directive or it's just like a quiet consensus that, like, we don't like these guys. They're not doing what we want. We're going to punish them. But it's tough to be at the other end of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, it's not good. I think – The thing that I think is actually the toughest, though, is it's global, right? And really, when you think about it, the U.S. government should be defending its companies, right? Not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies. So we talk about a lot, okay, what is the experience of... OK, if the U.S. government comes after you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think the real issue is that when the U.S. government does that to its tech industry, it's basically just open season around the rest of the world. I mean, the EU, I pull these numbers, the EU has fined the tech companies more than $30 billion over the last, I think it was like 10 or 20 years. Wow. Holy shit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So when you when you think about it, like, OK, there's it's like, you know, 100 million dollars here, a couple billion dollars there. But what I think really adds up to is this is sort of like a kind of EU wide policy for how they want to deal with American tech. It's almost like a tariff. And I think the US government basically gets to decide how are they going to deal with that, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Because if the US government, if some other country was screwing with another industry that we cared about, the US government would probably find some way to put pressure on them. But I think what happened here is actually the complete opposite. the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
government led the kind of attack against the companies, which then just made it so, like, the EU is basically, and all these other places, just free to just go to town on all the American companies and do whatever you want. But, I mean, look, obviously, like, I don't want to come across as if, like, we don't have things that we need to do better. Obviously, we do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And when we mess something up, we deserve to be held accountable for that and just like everyone else. I do think that the American technology industry is a bright spot in the American economy. I think it's a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world. And I think it should be part of the U.S. 's strategy going forward to defend that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And it's one of the things that I'm optimistic about with President Trump is I think he just wants America to win. And I think some of the stuff like the other governments who are kind of pushing on this stuff, it's At least the U.S. has the rule of law, right? So the government can come after you for something, but you still get your day in court and the courts are pretty fair.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
In 2016, there was the election of President Trump, also coincided with basically Brexit in the EU and sort of the fragmentation of the EU. And then, you know, in 2020, there was COVID. And I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time, we just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And so we've basically done a pretty good job of defending ourselves. And when we've chosen to do that, basically, we have a pretty good rate of winning. It's just not like that in every other country around the world. Like if other governments decide that they're going to go after you, you don't always get kind of a clear shake at kind of defending yourself on the rules.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I think to some degree, if the U.S. tech industry is going to continue being really strong – I do think that the U.S. government has a role in basically defending it abroad. And that's one of the things that I'm optimistic about will happen in this administration.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, I think there are a couple of different things here. One is this is something where I think X and Twitter just did it better than us on fact checking. We took the critique around fact checking, sorry, around misinformation. We put in place this fact checking program, which basically empowered these third party fact checkers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
They can mark stuff false and then we would downright get in the algorithm. I think what Twitter and X have done with community notes, I think it's just a better program. Rather than having a small number of fact checkers, you get the whole community to weigh in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
When people usually disagree on something, tend to agree on how they're voting on a note, that's a good sign to the community that there's actually a broad consensus on this, and then you show it. And you're showing more information, not less. So you're not using the fact check as a signal to show less, you're using the community note to provide real context and show additional information.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I think that that's better. For When you're talking about like nation states or people interfering, a lot of that stuff is best rooted out at the level of kind of accounts doing phony things. So you get like whether it's like China or Russia or Iran or like one of these countries, they'll set up these networks of fake accounts and bots.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And they coordinate and they post on each other's stuff to make it seem like it's authentic and kind of convince people. It's like, wow, a bunch of people must think this or something. And the way that you identify that is you build AI systems that can basically detect that those accounts are not behaving the way that a human would.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And when we find that, that there's like some bot that's operating an account.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
There are some things that a person just would never do. Have you met Lex Friedman? Yes. He might not be. He might not pass your Turing test.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think these guys are pretty sophisticated, and it's an adversarial space. So we find some technique, and then they basically kind of update their techniques. But we have a team of, it's effectively like intelligence, counterintelligence folks, counterterrorism folks, AI folks who are building systems to identify people
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
What are these accounts that are just not behaving the way that people would and how are they interacting? And then sometimes you trace it down and sometimes you get some tips from different intelligence agencies and then you can kind of piece together over time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, oh, this network of people is actually some kind of fake cluster of accounts and that's against our policies and we just take them all off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yes. I think for the specific problem around these large coordinated groups doing election interference or something, it's a large enough group. We have a bunch of people analyzing it. It's like they study it for a while. I think we're probably pretty accurate on that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But I actually think one of the bigger issues that we have in our moderation system is this precision issue that you're talking about. And that is actually, of all the things that we announced this week,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
In terms of how we're going to update the content policies, changing the content filters to have to require higher confidence and precision is actually going to be the thing that reduces the vast majority of the censorship mistakes that we make. Removing the fact checkers and replacing them with community notes, I think it's a good step forward.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
like a very small percent of content is fact checked in the first place. So it's, is that going to make the hugest difference? I'm not sure. Um, I think it'll be a positive step though. Um, and we, we like opened up some content policies. So some stuff that was restricted before we opened up, okay, that's good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It'll mean that some set of things that might've been censored before or not, but by far the biggest set of issues we have, and you and I have talked about a bunch of issues like this over the years is like, it's just, um, Okay, you have some classifier that's trying to find, say, like drug content, right? People decide, okay, it's like the opioid epidemic is a big deal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, and this is the thing. At the time, I was really sort of ill-prepared to kind of parse what was going on. I think part of my reflection looking back on this is I kind of think in 2016 and the aftermath, I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, OK, there's no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
We need to do a better job of cracking down on drugs and drug sales. I don't want people dealing drugs on our networks. So we build a bunch of systems that basically go out and try to automate finding people who are dealing drugs. And then you basically have this question. Which is how precise do you want to set the classifier?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So do you want to make it so that the system needs to be 99% sure that someone is dealing drugs before taking them down? Do you want it to be 90% confident, 80% confident? And then those correspond to amounts of... I guess the statistics term would be recall. What percent of the bad stuff are you finding?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So if you require 99% confidence, then maybe you only actually end up taking down 20% of the bad content. Whereas if you reduce it and you say, okay, we're only going to require 90% confidence. Now maybe you can take down 60% of the bad content. But let's say you say, no, we really need to find everyone who is doing this bad thing. And it doesn't need to be as severe as dealing drugs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It could just be – I mean it could be any kind of content of – any kind of category of harmful content. You start getting to some of these classifiers might have 80%, 85% precision in order to get 90% of the bad stuff down. But the problem is if you're at 90% precision, that means one out of 10 things that the classifier takes down is not actually problematic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And if you kind of multiply that across the billions of people who use our services every day, that is... millions and millions of posts that are basically being taken down that are innocent.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And upon review, we're going to look at and be like, this is ridiculous that this thing got taken down, which I mean, I think you've had that experience and we've talked about this for a bunch of stuff over time. But it really just comes down to this question of where do you want to set the classifiers? So one of the things that we're going to do
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
is basically set them to require more confidence, which is this trade-off. It's going to mean that we will maybe take down a smaller amount of the harmful content, but it will also mean that we'll dramatically reduce the amount of people whose accounts we're taking off. for a mistake, which is just a terrible experience, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, okay, you're going about your day and then one day you wake up and you're like, oh, my WhatsApp account just got deactivated because it's connected to a Facebook account and the Facebook account is, or like I'm using it on the same phone as a Facebook account where like we made some enforcement mistake and thought you were doing something bad that you weren't because our classifiers were set to too low of precision.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Not for memes, but go back to like a very severe thing. Like let's say someone is. Terrorists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Let's say someone is like terrorist content. They're planning some attack.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So we take down their account. Right. But then let's say that person can just go then sign up with another account.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Oh, well, if it's I mean, we run these different services and if they're on the same phone, it's basically, you know, it's one thing that, you know, it's basically regulators or governments will come to us and say, OK, it's you're clearly not doing enough if you kick someone off for terrorism and they can just like sign up for another account on the phone. Right. OK.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
You're also they also think, OK, well, we're not doing enough if we deactivate their Facebook account because they're like planning a terrorist attack. But we let them use all our other services. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
If you're aware. Yeah. So if our systems think that someone is a terrorist, then you probably need to deactivate their access to all the different accounts. Yeah, they can't get on threads. Threads, Instagram.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, that makes sense. So you can understand how you get there, but then you just get to this question around the precision and the confidence level. And then you're just making all these mistakes at scale, and it's just unacceptable. But I think it's a very hard calculation of like, where do you want to be?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Because on the one hand, like, I get it why people kind of come to us and they're like, no, you need to do a better job finding more of the terrorism or the drugs and all this stuff. But over time, the technology will get better and it'll get more precise. But at any given point in time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
That's the choice that we have to make is do we want to make more mistakes erring on the side of just like blowing away innocent people's accounts? Right. Or do we want to get a somewhat higher percent of the bad stuff off? And I think that there's just some balance that you need to strike on this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
People can't actually believe this stuff. Right. It has to be that there's this kind of like massive. Misinformation out there. Some of it started with the the Russia collusion stuff, but it kind of morphed into different things over time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, so I took this and just kind of assumed that everyone was acting in good faith. And I said, okay, well, there are concerns about misinformation. We should – just like when people raised other concerns in the past and we try to deal with them – Okay, yeah, people, you know, if you ask people, no one says that they want misinformation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. A lot of what we've seen, too, I mean, there's the anonymous accounts. Also, just over time, I think a lot of the kind of more interesting conversations have shifted from the public sphere to more private ones. So WhatsApp groups, private groups on Facebook.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I'm sure you have this experience where maybe 10 years ago you would have posted your kind of quick takes on whatever social media you're using. Now, you know, the stuff that I post on Facebook and Instagram, it's like I put time into making sure that that's kind of good content that I want to be seen broadly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And then like most of the jokes that I make are like with my friends and WhatsApp in groups. So, yeah, I think that's sort of that's kind of where the world is more broadly now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, and that's why that side of things, the kind of governments running these broad manipulation campaigns, I mean, we're not letting off the gas on that at all. I think most categories of bad stuff that we're policing, everyone agrees is bad. No one's sitting there defending that terrorism is good or child exploitation or drugs or IP violations or people inciting violence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like most of the stuff is bad. People clearly believe that... that election interference and foreign government manipulation of content is bad. This is the type of stuff that the vast majority of our energy goes towards that, and we're not changing our approach on any of that. The two categories
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
that I think have been very politicized are misinformation, because who gets to judge what's false and what's true? You may just not like my opinion on something, and then people think it's false, but I think that that one's really tricky. And the other one is basically what people refer to as hate speech.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
which I think also comes from a good place of wanting to crack down on that, of wanting to promote more inclusion and belonging and people feeling good and having a pluralistic society that can... that can basically have all these different communities coexist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But I think the problem is that all these things are on a spectrum, and when you go too far on them, I think on that side, we just basically got to this point where... there were these things that you just couldn't say, which were mainstream discourse, right? So it's like Pete Hegseth is going to probably be defending his nomination for Secretary of Defense on the Senate floor.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So maybe there's something that we should do to basically try to address this. But I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world. That's kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service. And so we tried to put in place a system that would deal with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think one of the points that he's made is that he thinks that women shouldn't be able to be in certain combat roles. And until we updated our policies, that wouldn't have been a thing that you could have said on our platforms because it would call for the exclusion of a protected category of people. And- So and it's like, OK, like on its on its face. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Calling for the exclusion of a protected category. That seems like that's OK. There's like legal protections. There's all the stuff. But, OK, if it's like OK to say on the floor of Congress, you should probably be able to debate it on social media. So so I think some of the stuff I think well-intentioned went too far, needs to just get rationalized a bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But but it's those two categories, misinformation and hate speech, I think, are the ones that got politicized. All the other ones, which is the vast majority of the stuff that we do, is I think people generally agree that it's good and we need to go after it. But then you just get into this problem of the mistakes like you're talking about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Okay, well, what confidence level do people want us to have in our enforcement? And at what point would people rather us kind of say, okay, I'm not sure that that one is causing an issue necessarily. So on balance, maybe we should just leave that person's account out because the pain of just nuking someone's account when you're not sure or you make a mistake is like that's pretty real too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, I mean the causality there is tricky because there's a lot of things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
You know, and early on tried to basically make it so that it was really limited. We're like, all right, we're just going to have the system where there's these third party fact checkers and they can check the worst of the worst stuff. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, it's tough to know. I mean I do come back to this point that every major incumbent lost their elections around the world this year. But I think that's also because of social media. It might be because of that revealing how kind of – incorrect and dishonest, I think, some of these governments were.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. So I think that that's quite possible. And I mean, I do think that there is this cycle that goes on where, you know, within a society, it's not just the government that has power. There's like certain people who are in these like culturally elite positions and, you know, journalists, TV, news anchors, like who are the people who people broadly trust, right? They're not all in government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
They're like a lot of people, you um, in other positions, it's like, who are the people that, that, uh, basically people look to. And, um, I think that's basically, it needs to shift for the internet age. And I think a lot of the people who people look to before, they're kind of realizing, hey, they weren't super honest about a lot of these issues that we face.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And that's partially why social media isn't a monolithic thing. It's not that people trust Facebook or X. They trust the creators and the voices that they feel like are being authentic and giving them valuable information on there. So there's, I think, going to be
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Just this whole new class of creators who basically become the new kind of cultural elites that people look at and are like, OK, these are the people who give it to me straight. And I think that that's that's a thing that is maybe it's possible because of social media. I think it's also just the Internet more broadly. I think podcasting is obviously a huge and important part of that, too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But, you know, but look, I mean. I've been working on this for a long time. So, I mean, you got to do what you think is right. You know, we've been on a long journey here, right? I mean, it's... And I think at some level, you start... You only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So things that are very clear hoaxes that there's like it's not like like we're not parsing speech about whether something is slightly true or slightly false, like Earth is flat, you know, things like that. Right. So that was sort of the original intent. Right. We put in place the system and it just sort of veered from there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I don't know to what extent you feel like you got to be large because of social media or just the podcasting platforms that you used. But I think that this is a very big sea change in terms of who are the voices that matter. And what we do is we try to build a platform that gives people a voice. But I think that there's this wholesale generational shift
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And who are the people who are being listened to? And I think that that's, like, a very fascinating thing that is going on because I think that that's, like, what's going on here. It's not just the government and people saying, hey, we want, like, a very big change here. I think it's just, like, a wholesale shift in saying –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
We just want different people who we actually trust, who are actually going to tell us the truth and not give us the bullshit opinions that you're supposed to say, but the type of stuff that I would actually, like when I'm sitting in my living room with my friends, the stuff that we know is true. Who are the people who kind of have the courage to actually just say that stuff? I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think that whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, I'm sure you know the history on this. It's like when people transition from radio to TV, the initial TV anchors were the same radio people, but just like being filmed while speaking on the radio. But it turned out it actually was a completely different type of person that you need because on your radio is just like your voice and your cadence and all that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, you know, the whole phrase. It's like you've got a good radio voice. Right. It's like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
OK, on TV, you need to be telegenic, right? You need to kind of have charisma in that medium. It's like a completely different thing. And I think that that's going to be true for the Internet, too. It's you know, it's not as cut. I think part of it is the format, right? The fact that you do these like two, three hour episodes. I mean.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think to some degree, it's because some of the people whose job is to do fact checking, a lot of their industry is focused on political fact checking. So they're just kind of veered in that direction. And we kept on trying to basically get it to be what we had originally intended, which is just, you know, it's not the point is into like, judge people's opinions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I hated doing TV because, you know, I basically got started... I started Facebook when I was 19. And I was good at some things, very bad at others. I was good at coding and, like, real bad at kind of, like, talking to people and explaining what I was doing. And I just, like, had these experiences early on where...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I'd go on TV and it wouldn't go well and they'd cut it down to some random soundbite and I'd look stupid. And then basically I'd get super nervous about going on TV because I knew that they were just going to cut it in some way that I was going to look like a fucking idiot. And so I'm just like, this sucks, right? So I just like... It's kind of a funny thing. In some ways, it's like, okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
At the same time, I was gaining confidence being able to build more and more complicated products. Even as an early 20s person, I was like, I could do this. Then on the TV and comms public side, I was like, this is a disaster. Every time I go out, it's worse and worse and worse. It's one of the reasons why I think on the internet,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Like there's no reason to cut it to a four minute soundbite conversation. It's like part of what what makes it authentic is like we can just I mean, these are complex issues. We can unpack it for hours and probably still have hours more stuff to talk about. It just it's I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, and also, like, when you're having a conversation, like, I don't know, it's like when you start talking about something, your kind of subconscious kicks in. You start thinking about the topic. So it's like you might not actually have the thing that you want to say until, like, five minutes later. Right, right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, it's like when we started this conversation, I think, like, the first few minutes were just kind of slow. It's, like, warming up. I'm like, okay, kind of, like, downloading into my memory. Like, how am I going to, like, you know, it's like how am I going to, you know, just explain these different – Yeah, I just think that's sort of how people work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's to provide in this layer to kind of help fact check some of the stuff that seems the most extreme. But it just, you know, it was just never accepted by people broadly. I think people just felt like the fact checkers were too biased. And not necessarily even so much in what they ruled, although sometimes I think people would disagree with that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of the people I've met there I think are good people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I don't think that the pushing for social media companies to censor stuff was legal. I mean, there's all this stuff about what, like, people talk about the First Amendment and, okay, these tech platforms should offer free speech like the First Amendment. That, I think, is a philosophical principle. The First Amendment doesn't apply to companies in our content moderation.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's more of an American ethos about how we think that best dialogue is carried out. But the First Amendment does apply to the government. That's the whole point, right, is the government is not allowed to censor this stuff. So at some level, I do think that having people in the administration calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
threatening repercussions if we don't take down things that are true is like, it's pretty bad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
A lot of the material is public. I mean, Jim Jordan led this whole investigation in Congress. I mean, it was basically, I think about this as like, You know, what Elon did on the Twitter files when he took over that company, I think Jim Jordan basically did that for the rest of the industry with the congressional investigation that he did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And we just turned over, like, all of the documents and everything that we had to them, and they basically put together this report.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
A lot of the time, it was just what types of things they chose to even go and fact check in the first place. So I kind of think, like, after having gone through that whole exercise, it – I don't know, it's something out of like, you know, 1984, one of these books where it's just like, it really is a slippery slope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, well, the COVID thing, I don't think it was election interference as much as it was just like government meddling where it shouldn't have. But yeah, no, I mean, it's tougher for me to say, you know, like what specific retribution or justice should happen to anyone who is involved in these things. But I think your point about...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
let's make sure this doesn't happen again, is the one that I'm more focused on. Because it's the thing that I reflect on on my journey on all this, which is like, okay, yeah, so we didn't take down the stuff that was true, but we did generally defer to the government on some of these policies that in retrospect I probably wouldn't knowing what I know now. And
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I just think that that's that's sort of the journey that we've been on is like, OK, we start the thing focused on free expression, go through some like pretty crazy times in the world, get it pressure tested, see where we basically ended up doing stuff that led to a slippery slope that we weren't happy with the conclusion and like try to reset. And that's sort of the moment that we're at now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
is trying to just rationalize a bunch of the policies. And look, I mean, obviously crazy things can happen in the future that might unearth something that I haven't, you know, some kind of angle on this that I haven't thought enough about yet. So... I'm sure I'm not done making mistakes in the world. But I think at this point, we have a much more thorough understanding of what the space is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think our kind of values and principles on this are likely going to be much more durable going forward. And I think that that's probably a good thing for the Internet. I think it's great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And it just got to a point where it's just, okay, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States to have this program. And I guess it was probably about a few years that I really started coming to the conclusion that we were going to need to change something about that. COVID was the other big one where... That was also very tricky because, you know,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, he's like, talk about like an amazing entrepreneur, right? It's like, I just want, like, because I control our company, I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me. It's like a normal corporate environment. It's like basically the CEO just tries to like – they're just trying to convince the board to like let them have their job and pay them more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, all right, the board doesn't pay me except for security. And and I'm not worried about losing my job because I control the majority of the voting in the company. So I actually get to use our board to like have the smartest people who I can get to have around me help work on these problems. So it's like, all right, who are the people I want?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Like, I just want like the best entrepreneurs and people have created different things. And like, I mean, Dana is like this guy. I mean, he basically took the sport from being this like, I think it was viewed as like this pretty marginal thing when he got started, right? I think John McCain was trying to outlaw it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And now it's like, I think it and F1 are the two fastest growing sports in the world. It's got hundreds of millions of people viewing it. It's like, I mean, what Dana's done with the UFC is like one of the most legendary business stories ever. And, um, and the brand is beloved. And, and I think he's just, um, so he's like a world-class entrepreneur and he's just like a, he's got a strong backbone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think part of what the conversation that I had with him around joining our board was okay. Like, we have a lot of governments and folks around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company. And like, we need some like strong people who are going to basically, you know, help, help advise us on how to handle some of these situations. And, and so, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But, yeah, I mean, running this company is not for the faint of heart. I mean, there's definitely a lot of pressure from, like, all these different governments. And then it's like, okay, I could spend all my time doing that, but I'm not even a politician. Like, I just want to spend my time building things, right? So, yeah, I think Dana's going to be great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
At the beginning, it was, you know, it's like a legitimate public health crisis, you know, in the beginning. And it's, you know, even people who are like the most ardent First Amendment, you know, defenders, the Supreme Court has this clear precedent. It's like, all right, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. There are times when if there's an emergency...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I do like Iron Neck. But it's... But when I started training, not just jujitsu, but striking, I was like, all right, I want to find a way to do this where I don't like, like hurt my brain. Right. Like I need to, I'm going to be running this company for a while. I would like to, you know, like stay, stay healthy and not take too much damage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And so I think the number one thing you need to do is, well, in addition to having good partners is have a strong neck. Yes. So, yeah. So, yeah. I take that pretty seriously.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And your ability to speak can temporarily be curtailed in order to get an emergency under control. So I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of COVID. It seemed like, OK, you have this virus. It seems like it's killing a lot of people. I don't know. We didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be. So at the beginning, it kind of seemed like, OK.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's not as acute. I think it's like, sometimes you have someone trying to choke you unconscious slowly over a multi-month, multi-year period. And that's, that's business. But, um, but no, I think that sometimes in business, the cycle time is so long that it is very refreshing to just have a feedback loop. That's like, Oh, I like had my hand down. So I got punched in the face.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, that's like, that's, um, but yeah, Yeah, no, it's really important to me for balance. I mean, I basically try to train every morning. I'm either doing general fitness or kind of MMA. I do sometimes grappling, sometimes striking, or sometimes both. But it got to the point where I tore my ACL training. I was probably... At that point, I didn't have...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I wasn't integrated between my weight training and my fighting training. So I think I was probably overdoing it. So now we basically, I'm just trying to do this in a cohesive way, which I think will be more sustainable. But when I tore my ACL, first of all, everyone at the company was like, ah, fuck, we're going to get so many more emails now. It's like that he can't do this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And then I sat down with Priscilla and And I expected her to be like, you're an idiot. Like, what do you expect? You're like, you know, I was in my late 30s at the time. But she was like, no. She's like, when you heal your ACL, you better go back to fighting. And I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, you are so much better to be around now that you're doing this. You have to fight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, it definitely takes the edge off things. But it's like after like a couple of hours of doing that in the morning, it's just like, yeah, it's like nothing else that day is going to stress you out that much. You can just deal with it. Voluntary adversity. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
No, it's good. It's good. It's also good, I think, to be a little bit tired. It's like it just it's I love that feeling of just like you're not like exhausted. And sometimes you get a session and you just go so hard and I need to like just go to sleep or something.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
We should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this. But when it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve to, you know, and like in the beginning, it was like, OK, there aren't enough masks. Masks aren't that important to them. It's like, oh, no, you have to wear a mask. And, you know, like everything was shifting around.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, it's opened a lot of how I think about stuff. I mean, it is just interesting when your point about like having a pill that allows you to just kind of know that you have this kind of physical ability. It's a superpower. It's interesting because I do think a lot of our... society has become very like, I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I don't even know the right word for it, but it's like, it kind of like neutered or like emasculated. And it's, there's like a whole energy in this that I think it's, it is very healthy in the right balance. Um, I mean, I think part of the reason, um, One of the things that I enjoy about it is I feel like I can just express myself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like when you're running a company, people typically don't want to see you being this ruthless person who's like, I'm just going to crush the people I'm competing with. But when you're fighting, it's like, no, no, that's like... You're rewarded. I think in some ways, when people see me competing in this sport, they're like, oh, no, that's the real Mark.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, because it goes back to all the media training stuff we were talking about. When I'm going and giving my sound bites for two minutes, it's like... No, it's like, fuck that guy. It's like, that's the real one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Super. I think there's a lot of sports that are like, nah, we don't want you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I just become very difficult to kind of follow. And this really hit me. The most extreme, I'd say during it was during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. And I'm generally like pretty pro rolling out vaccines. I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative. But.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a good crew. I mean, when I got hurt, I really kind of missed the guys I trained with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And it's like Dave has put together this group. It's basically all these young pro fighters who are kind of up and coming, kind of early 20s, but they've only been doing it for a few years. So I've been doing it for a few years. That way it's like we kind of have a more similar level of skill, and they're all better than me. But in terms of I'm like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I was in my late 30s and they're in their early 20s. It was sort of like they're kind of coming into becoming men. I'm like sort of at the end of my fiscal week. But it's like, it's... It's a really good crew. Yeah, no, it's a good crew. And the competing thing is fun. I can't wait to get back to that too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, it's like basically, I mean, I was also doing it with, so it's basically a group of pro fighters and then a handful of meta executives would do it. And then basically we would just kind of like fight each other and it would be fun. And then one of them decided one day that they were like, you know, I think I'm getting pretty good at jujitsu. I'm going to go to a tournament.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I was like, all right, good luck with that, bro. I'm not going to go to a tournament. I don't want to go to a tournament and get embarrassed. But then the guy goes to the tournament and he does pretty well. I'm like... That guy, it's like, it's like, okay, it's like we go all the time and like, and if he's doing well in a tournament, that's like, all right, fine. Sign me up. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like some, I mean, it's just like super competitive. So this was like, when was this? It must've been, I don't know. I guess I rolled into this tournament. And I registered under my first and middle name. So people didn't know who I was. And I had like sunglasses and a hat and I wore a COVID mask.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, the whole point of social media is basically, you know, giving people the ability to share what they want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And like, and I, and basically it was like, it wasn't until they called our names to step onto the mat that I was like, all right, take all this stuff off. And the guy was like, oh, what?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
They kind of freak out. I think he was trying to figure out what was going on. Afterwards, his coach was like, I think that was Mark Zuckerberg who just submitted me. And the coach was like, no, no way. And it's like, no, I think that was. He's like, what? You're fighting Mark Zuckerberg? He's like, get back in there. It's like, go fight him. He's like, no, he just submitted me. It's just...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. No, I think, yeah. Yeah, I can't wait to get back to competing. It's been sort of a slow journey on the rehab. It's sort of like learning twice, but we're getting there. How far out are you? Oh, no, I'm done with the rehab now. Now I'm just ramping back up. How far out are you from surgery? Um... 12 months, 13 months.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Oh, so young. Yeah. Because my doctor is basically like, look, you're at the boundary. You could go either way. But if you want to compete again, then I'd recommend doing the patella.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true. Right. I mean, they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects. You basically need to take down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, I can kind of do everything that I want at this point. It's still like a little sore, but I don't know. I think that it's supposed to be a couple years until you feel like it's fully. I think it takes some time for the nerves to grow into it and all that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Why didn't you use peptides? I don't know. I just took my doctor's advice on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
100% for sure. But it's been this interesting opportunity to like, like, I really don't want that to happen again. So I, I feel like I'm so much more focused on technique. Like the first time that I learned all this stuff, I was like, I was probably like a little too brutish about it and just like muscling through stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And now, I don't know, now I feel like I'm like really learning how to do this stuff correctly and I can do it way more effortlessly. So it's- Yeah, that's the goal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I was like the end of a session, and so we're two hours into training, and I was doing like a few rounds, and I basically threw a leg kick, and the other guy went to check it, and I like leaned back to try to get around the check and just put too much torque on my knee. So it was the planted leg. Mine was the planted leg too. Yeah, but it's, I don't know, Dave was like,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Before that round, Dave was like, you're done. I'm like, no, one more round.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Basically, I had also just done a really hard leg workout the day before, but the fight guys didn't know that. I really just pushed it too hard.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I've looked at it a bunch. I mean, the rehab thing I took really seriously, and I thought that was pretty interesting, too. I don't want to, like, have to do a lot of rehabs like this one, but to do one of them, I actually thought it was a pretty interesting experience because it's like week over week you're just getting back so much mobility and ability to do stuff. Yeah. No, I feel like I'm...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I don't know. At this point, probably half of my weight training is effectively rehab and joint health stuff, like wrists, shoulders, knee, all that, in addition to the big muscle groups.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of people just focus on, like, the big movements and weight training. And it's, I don't know, first of all, for, like, a lot of fighting type stuff, you kind of want to be loose and, like, not super tight.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I was just like, well, we're not going to do that. Like, we're clearly not going to do that. I mean, that is kind of inarguably true.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But, yeah, I mean, I just think, like, the joint stability stuff is you get older and want to do this for a longer period of time. It's good to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
There's, like, all these master's divisions and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
No, I think it's super intellectual in terms of actually breaking this stuff down. I mean, both jujitsu and, like, striking, I mean, yeah, you don't have time to think, but, like, the reasoning behind why you kind of want to slip in certain ways and, like, the probability game that you're playing is... I don't know. I used to fence when I was in high school, and I did that pretty competitively.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I was never quite good enough to be at the Olympic level, but I was pretty good. And we virtual fenced last time you were here. Yeah, there you go. And, like, I... I just remember I would sit in my classes in high school and sketch out combinations of moves and sequences for how to faint and kind of trick someone to get them out of position to be able to tap them. And it's...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I feel like this is a game in the same way. I mean, I think when you're training, you're not slugging at each other that much. You're just playing tag.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It was people in the Biden administration. I think it was, you know, I wasn't involved in those conversations directly, but I think it was.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think I probably will, but we'll see. 2025, I think, is going to be a very busy year on the AI side. And I think the idea of having a competition, you really need to get into the headspace of, like, I'm going to fight someone this week. So I need to figure this out, because I don't know how, with everything that's going on in AI,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
have like a week or two where i can just get into this like i'm gonna go fight someone but but it's good it's good training uh but and i would like to at some point um you know the thing about the acl injury is i i kind of thought before this it's like all right i'm gonna do some jiu-jitsu competitions i want to do one mma fight like one kind of like pro or competitive mma fight and then i figured i'd go back to jiu-jitsu but
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think tearing the ACL striking is a little more of a fluke. I think you're much more likely to do that grappling. So going through the ACL experience didn't make me want to just exclusively go do the version where you're just attacking joints all day long. So I'm like, all right, I can take a few more punches to the face before we go back to that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, but jiu-jitsu isn't always slower controlled, especially when you're competing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, yeah, and I watched, I saw the one that you did with him too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's kind of just what I was saying before. I think the... For me, it's...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
just i think a lot of the corporate world is is like pretty culturally neutered and and i i just think like having you know i i grew up i have three sisters no brothers um i have three daughters no sons so i'm like surrounded by girls and women like my my whole life and it's like so i think um I don't know. The kind of masculine energy, I think, is good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it. And I do think that there's just something. It's like, I don't know, all these forms of energy are good. And I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive. That has been kind of a positive experience for me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Just having a thing that I can just do with my guy friends and we just beat each other a bit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And... And it goes back to our original mission is just give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
No, and look, I think part of the intent on all these things I think is good. I do think that... If you're a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it's too masculine. It's like there isn't enough of the kind of the energy that you may naturally have. And it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And that's not good either because you want women to be able to succeed and like have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what. you know, what their background or gender, you know. But I think these things can always go a little far. And I think it's one thing to say we want to be kind of like welcoming and make a good environment for everyone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad. and I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the, the kind of the spectrum where, you know, it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to like get rid of it completely. It's like, no, like it's both of these things are good, right? It's like, you want like feminine energy, you want masculine energy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Like, I think that that's like, you're going to have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that's all good. But, um, But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more much more masculine culture.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And not that it doesn't try to be inclusive in its own way, but I think that there's just a lot more of that energy there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. But yeah, I mean, there are these things, there are like a few of these things throughout your life where you just, you have an experience and you're like, where has this been my whole life? And it just turned on like a part of my brain that I was like, okay. Yeah. Like, this was a piece of the puzzle that should have been there, and I'm glad it now is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, well, so, I mean, we have this ranch out in Kauai, and there's invasive pigs. And we—on our ranch, we have— There's a lot of albatross. I don't know if they're endangered or just threatened. And then there's the Hawaiian state bird, the nene goose. That's, I think, endangered, or at least was until recently.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Most of them in the world live in a small stretch, or at least most of them on Kauai live in a small stretch that includes our ranch. So you constantly have these pigs that just multiply so quickly, and we basically have to apply pressure to the population or else they just get...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
overrun and threaten the birds and the other wildlife and so and what I basically explained to my daughters who I also want to learn how to do this because I just feel like it's like look we We have this land. We take care of it. Just like you mow the grass, we need to make sure that these populations are in check. It's part of what we do as the stewards of this. And we've got to do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And then if you have to kill something, then you should obviously treat it with respect and use the meat to make food and kind of celebrate in that way. But it's a culture that I think it's... It's just an important thing for kids to grow up, understanding, like, the circle of life, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So, you know, teaching, like, teaching the kids all of, you know, what is kind of how you'd run a ranch, how you'd run a farm. I think that that stuff... It's good. I mean, because, you know, explaining to the kids what a tech company is is really abstract, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So for a while, my daughters were pretty convinced that my actual job was Mark's Meats, which is our kind of ranch and like the cattle that we ranch. I was like, well, not quite. And you'll learn when you get older.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But I think that there's something that's just much more tangible about that than taking them to the office and sitting in product reviews or something for some piece of software that we're writing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. Although my favorite is bow, bow and arrow. I mean, that's, I think like the most, that feels like the most kind of sporting version of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, and you just kind of go and hang out. Yeah, and you have to be fit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I'm, I mostly, mostly use a rifle just cause it's so much more efficient. Um, you know, your, your conversion rate is so much higher, but it's, uh, but yeah, another, what kind of boat do you have? Gosh, I didn't get to do it this season, but, um, do you know the company that makes it? Not off the top of my head. Oh, you have to know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I can get you hooked up. Yeah. It works. Okay. Do you know how old it is? No, it's not old. Okay. I think it's like just a compound bow that I got strung to my draw length. Did you get someone to coach you? Yeah, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's basically a bunch of the guys who help run security around the ranch.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I'm definitely not doing that. Yeah. See, that's the thing. But how far away are you shooting things from?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, because I was going to say, I don't think I've ever shot something more than 50 yards out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's 3.2 billion people use one of our services every day. Yeah. No, it's wild.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's almost half of Earth. Well, on a monthly basis, it is probably half of Earth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. Have you ever experienced that? I mean, I've missed, if that's what you're asking. I haven't analyzed it at this level of detail. But, no, I mean, there are a lot of boars on our ranch. You get a lot of practice. Yeah, and also, like, we have a range.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And we, I don't know, we set up bowling pins, and, you know, it's like we shoot pistols at the bowling pins, but I also, like, just, like... I'm usually faster at taking down all the bowling pins with a bow and arrow than most of my friends are with a pistol, which I think is pretty fun. But, yeah, no, I'm just more casual.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I'm clearly not doing it at your level, and you've given me another side quest to maybe go deeper on. That's what I'm saying.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I do think the dynamic that you're talking about, though, where if you only see one animal on a multi-day, then that is just way higher stakes than anything that I'm doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I'm talking about the archery that I'm doing. I go out, it's like, you're going to see some pigs, and it's like, if I don't hit any, it's like, my family's still eating, it's okay. I'm not like... Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I've clearly not learned this in a very rigorous way. I'll hook you up. Yeah. I can get people to come to you. I posted a video on Instagram once of me, I think, hitting bowling pins with archery. And all the comments were like, man, your form is shit. So I think it checks out with the conversation that we're having now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
You should never read comments. That's fair. That's fair. I've never had anything good come out of reading comments. Yeah. Although, I don't know. It's pretty funny. I think that just like getting the gist and the summary of it I think is pretty funny.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. But, I mean, I do read my friends' comments and when even they're like, man, that's ugly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, and I think, you know, we basically, my kids at this point are nine, seven, and one and a half.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think that it's about to start getting a lot more complicated. I think, you know, the nine and seven-year-old. But, I mean, just kind of deciding what technology they're going to use and what's good and what's not and all the dynamics around that. It's really complicated. And look, I mean, I think every family has their own values and how they want to approach this, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So from my perspective, you know, we have... One of my daughters just, like, loves building stuff. So she clearly, like, takes after me in this way. It's like every day she's just, like, creating some random thing. It's like she's creating stuff with Legos and, you know, it's, like... One day it's that, or the next day it's Minecraft.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And from my perspective, it's like, okay, I don't know, Minecraft is actually kind of a cooler tool to build stuff than Lego is a lot of the way. So am I going to say that there needs to be some kind of limit on her screen time if she's doing something that's creative, that's maybe like a richer form of what she would have been doing physically? Right. In that case, probably not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Now, there were times when... She'd get so excited about what she was building in Minecraft or something that she was coding in Scratch that she'd wake up early to kind of get her tablet. And that was bad, right? Because then it's like starting to get in the way of her sleep. And I'm like, you know, August, you can't do that, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like we're going to take your iPad away if you're doing that. You're a little psycho. What are you doing? Getting up early? No, it's like August. I did that too when I was a kid, but trust me, you're going to want to sleep.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's either going to work or it's going to end badly. But I feel like building stuff, I feel generally pretty good about. I think communication, I generally feel pretty good about the kids using. I mean, they use it to talk to their grandparents or parents and cousins. That type of stuff is good.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Messenger Kids, the thing that we built, it's basically like a messaging service that the parents can choose who can contact the kids and just approve every contact. That's much better than just having an open texting service. Yeah. But I don't know, but there's a lot of stuff that's pretty sketchy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I kind of think different parents are going to have different lines on what they want their kids to be able to do and not. So some people might not even want their kids to be able to message even with friends when they're nine and seven. Some people might say, hey, no, Minecraft, that's just a game. I don't think about that as building. I think that is a game.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I don't want to limit the time that you're doing that. I want you to go read books instead or whatever the values are that that family has. So for meta... what we've kind of come to is we want to be the most aligned with parents on giving parents the tools that they need to basically control how the experiences work for their kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Now we don't even really, except for like stuff like messenger kids, we don't even have our services, our apps generally available to people under the age of 13 at all. So I'm in our kids. I haven't had to like have the conversation about when, when they get Instagram or Facebook or any of that stuff. But, um, but when they turn 13, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
we basically want parents to be able to have complete control over the kid's experience. And that's, you know, we just rolled out this Instagram teens thing, which is, it's a set of, of controls where, you know, it's, if you're an older teen, we'll just default you into the private experience. That way you're not getting like harassed or bombarded with stuff. And, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But if you're a younger teen, then you have to get your parents permission and they actually have to like sign in and do all the stuff in order to make it so that you can connect with people who are beyond your network or if you want to kind of be a public figure, like all these different kinds of things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I think that that's probably from a values perspective where we should be is just trying to like be an ally of parents. But it is complicated stuff. I mean, it's every family wants to do it differently.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, the people who do the training in VR definitely make less mistakes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
My zombie game is Arizona Sunshine. Oh, what's that one? It can be multiplayer, and there's horde mode where you just get in there and... They're like four friends, and there's just waves of zombies come, and you have to kill them all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's very therapeutic. You just wait until they come at a point-blank range.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Is that possible? It's possible. I think that there's other things that are probably more important to deliver. So I guess taking a step back. A lot of how we think about the goal here is delivering like a realistic sense of presence. Right. No technology today gives you the feeling as if you're like physically there with another person. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
You're you're like interacting with them through a phone. You have this little window. It's kind of taking you away from everything. That's like the magic of augmented and virtual reality is like you actually feel this like presence, like you're there with another person. Right. The question is, OK, how do you do that? And it's like there's like a million things that contribute to that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, obviously, first, just being able to look around and have the room stay, getting good spatial audio, right? If someone speaks, then it should do the audio. It needs to be 3D and come from the place where they're speaking. Yeah. It's very interesting which things end up being important for creating this sense of presence and which don't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So having hands, obviously, if you're just looking around but you can't actually move things, that breaks the illusion. But having hands, like hand tracking that you can do stuff is important. One thing that we found that's kind of funny is... is it's actually not that important that you see your arms. You just need to see your hands.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Obviously, seeing your arms is a bonus unless we incorrectly interpolate where your elbows are or something. So if we're looking at your hand or if we have a controller, we can know, okay, your hand is here. But that doesn't necessarily tell us where your elbow is. Your elbow could be like this. It could be like this. So you can kind of guess from that. But if we get that wrong...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And you like see in VR, it's like you see the hand there and your elbow is like looks like it's here when it's actually out there. You're like, ah, what's going on? Like that's messed up. So it's a lot of these things like you just don't want to get these details wrong. So haptics, the most important first thing for haptics is on the hand, right? I mean, we have so many more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Um, the neurons basically, or not neurons, but just like the, like sensation, it's like such higher resolution, um, on your, on your fingertips than anywhere else in the body. So, you know, when you grab something, you know, making it so that you feel some pushback, right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
When you, there's a lot of gaming systems at this point where if you like pull a trigger, you get like a little bit of a rumble or something, um, We built this one thing where it's like a ping pong paddle with a sensor in it. And you feel the ball.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
like the virtual ball hitting the ping pong paddle and it feels like like when you're actually playing ping pong it doesn't it's not like a generic thing where just like you feel it hit the paddle you feel where it hits the paddle and we basically built a system where now with this like physical paddle you can kind of it that the haptics make it so you can feel where the ball hits the paddle so it's like all these things like are just going towards delivering a more realistic experience so um
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Full body haptics. So, there are some things that I think it could do. Like, if you're playing a boxing game and you get punched in the stomach, you can probably simulate something like that a little. It's not going to be able to deliver that much force. So, I mean, I guess that's maybe a good thing because no one wants to get punched in the stomach that hard. But, like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's not going to be able to deliver enough force for you to, for example, let's say you're not just boxing, you're kickboxing. Like, I don't know, you need something on the other side to be able to complete it, right? Because it's like when you kick, when you're just practicing, it's like you spin, right? Because you don't want to just like stop. And that's like the shadowing a kick. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Like there's not going to be anything that you can do as like a single person playing VR with a haptic suit that like makes it so that you're going to be able to kick someone who's not there physically and actually be able to do that. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So like grappling, it's like I think that jujitsu is going to be the last thing that we're able to do in VR because you need the momentum of the other person and to be able to move them. The boxing thing is actually good. Boxing works.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, boxing works. And you don't really need the haptics. I think it would be better with it. That's probably one of the better cases. I think it's that and getting shot or sword fighting type stuff. So you can just feel it on your body. I don't know. I think what's basically going to end up happening is you're going to have a home set up for these things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And then you're going to have... There are these location-based services where people... It's almost like a theme park where you can go into and you can have a really immersive VR experience where it's not just that you get a vest that can simulate some haptics. It's that you're also in a real physical environment. So they can like...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
have smoke come out or something and you can smell that and feel that or like spray some water and it feels humid. And I think that it still is going to be a while before you can just like virtually create all those sensations. I think a lot of those really rich experiences are going to be in these very constructed environments.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, you know, in terms of neural interfaces, there are two approaches to the problem, roughly. Right. There's the kind of jacket into your brain neural interface. And there's the wrist based neural interface thing that, you know, we showed you for Orion, the smart glasses.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And I would guess that. You know, I think it's going to be a while before we're really widely deploying anything that jacks into your brain. I think that there are a lot of people who don't want to be the early adopters of that technology. You want to like wait until that's pretty mature before you get that. I mean, that's basically going to get started in medical use cases, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So if someone like loses sensation part of their body and now you have the ability to fix that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, so, I mean, like you're saying, I mean, this is... It's so complicated, this system, that I could spend every minute of all of my time doing this and not actually focused on building any of the things that we're trying to do. AI, glasses, like the future of social media, all that stuff. So I get involved in this stuff, but in general, we have a policy team. There are people who I trust.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. So I think you'll basically start with people who have pretty severe conditions, who the upside is very significant, before you start jacking people in to play games better. Right? Right. A wrist-based thing, I mean, that's something, I mean, like people wear stuff on their wrist all the time, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So, and what we basically found there, that doesn't do input to you, but it's good for giving you the ability to control a computer. Because basically you have all these extra neurons that go from your brain to controlling your hand. Your hand is like super complicated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And there's actually all these extra pathways because for a bunch of reasons, I'm neuroplasticity in case you like lose the ability to use one, they want to be able to have others. So you want the redundancy because being able to use your hand is super important. So in normal use, we've kind of all figured out some patterns of how we send signals from our brain to our hand. And yeah,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think the reality is there's like all these other patterns, too, that are unused today. So you can put a wristband on your wrist that can measure activity across these neurons. And today we're starting by basically measuring as you're doing as you're like moving your fingers. But over a few versions of this, we're going to get to is like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
you won't actually even have to move your hand you'll just like trigger these neurons in opposing ways it's like you probably can't see right now it's like i'm kind of flexing something in this finger and something here so like it's not actually moving but there's some signal that the neural interface wristband if i were wearing it could pick up and i just think we're gonna be we're gonna like have glasses and we're gonna be able to be here and i'm like gonna be able to like you know
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
text my wife or friends or something or text AI and like get an answer to something it's like I forgot something while we were talking let me just text AI okay I just did that it's like and you can do it sitting there without anyone totally discreetly and you have glasses and like the answer just comes into your glasses I mean for me one of the one of the positive things
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
When COVID hit, everyone in software basically started working remotely for a while because you can, right? Software, it's like, okay, whatever. You don't have to be in the office. You can kind of be in different places. And a lot of the meetings went on to Zoom. And one of the best things about that – was basically you were able to politely have all these side conversations, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So it's like when you're seeing someone in person, it would be super rude if I like pulled out my phone and like just started texting someone. It would just be really weird, right? But when you're like talking to someone online, it's like, I don't know, I guess because they either can't tell your attention because it's like, because there's not good presence or if it's just the norm.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But they're like, you have like the main group conversation And then I was like, at least the norm for me was I could just like text different people on the side. It's like, OK, what do you think of this point that this person is making this meeting? Right. Like in normal life, it's like oftentimes I'd have some discussion that I have to sync up with people afterwards about how that go.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But now it's like I could do that all at the same time. Right. So you're having the group discussion and you're having the conversations with the people about the discussion that you're having in real time. But you can only do that over Zoom.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I think being able to do that in kind of physical interactions where you're just like you're interacting with people and you can just like use an AI augmentation to be able to get extra context or help you think through something or remember something just to be able to kind of have a better conversation, be able to not have to follow up on something after the fact.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think it's going to be super useful for all these different things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
The people are kind of working on this on a day-to-day basis. And the interactions that... That I was just referring to. I mean, a lot of this is documented. I mean, because, you know, Jim Jordan and the House had this whole investigation and committee into into the kind of government censorship around stuff like this. And we produced all these documents and it's all in the public domain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, you know, I actually think it'll be a lot better on that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, because right now we have our phones, but it takes you away from the physical environment around you. You're kind of sucked into this little screen. I think now in the future... our computing platform as it becomes more of like a glasses or eventually contact lens form factor is you're going to actually, the internet is going to get overlaid on the physical world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So it's not like we have the physical world and now I have all my digital stuff through this tiny little window. In the future, it'll be, okay, all my attention goes to the world. The world consists of physical things and virtual things that are overlaid on it. So if we wanted to play poker or something,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
we can have a physical deck of cards or we could just have a virtual kind of hologram deck of cards and snap your hands, here's the deck of cards. And like our friend who can't be here physically, like he's here as a hologram, but he can play with the kind of digital deck of cards. Also, I think, let's say you're like doing something at work, you're working on a project,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think in the future we'll have AI coworkers. Those people won't even – they're not even people. They wouldn't be able to be embodied. So if you're having a physical meeting, you're sitting around with a bunch of people, they couldn't show up as, like, you know, part of the team no matter what.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But I think, like, we'll get to a point where just, like, your friend could show up in a hologram and, like, you're – your AI colleagues will be able to also. So I think we'll basically be in this wild world where it's like most of the world will be physical.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
There'll be this increasing amount of virtual objects or people who are kind of beaming in or hologramming into different things to interact in different ways. I actually think that natural blending of the kind of digital world and the physical is way more natural than the segmentation that we have today where it's like you're in the physical world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And now I'm just going to go tune it out to look at my my like I'm going to access the whole digital universe through this like five inch screen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I don't know. It's just it seems natural to me. It's like that's this is the world. There isn't like a physical world in a digital world anymore. We're in 2025. It's one world like these things should get blended.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, I kind of liked the theory that It's only God if only one company or government controls it. If you were the only person who had access to a computer and the internet, you would have this inhuman power that everyone else didn't have because you could use Google and you could get access to all this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, basically, these people from the Biden administration were. would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse. And it's like, these documents are... It's all kind of out there. Did you record any of those phone calls? I don't... No, I don't think... I don't think we... But I think... I want to listen. I mean, there are emails. The emails are published. It's all kind of out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But then when everyone has it, it makes us all better, but it's also an even playing field. So that's kind of what we're going for with this whole open source thing is I just like I don't think that there's going to be like one AI. I certainly don't think that there should be one company that controls AI.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think you like want there to be a diversity of different things and a diversity of people creating different things. different things with it. I mean, some of it will be kind of serious and helping you think through things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think like with anything on the internet, a lot of it is just going to be funny and like fun and content and people are going to create agents that are like AIs that are entertaining and they'll pass them around almost like content where it's like, just like you pass around like a reel or a video and you're like, this thing is fun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
like in the future like a video it's not interactive you know you watch it and you're consuming it but i think a lot of more entertainment in the future will be inherently interactive where someone will kind of sculpt an experience or an ai and then they'll show someone it's like oh this is funny but like it's not necessarily going to interact with that ai every day it's like okay it's funny for five minutes and then you pass it along to your friends and um so i don't know i think i think you're like
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
You want the world to have all these different things. And I think that's probably also, from my perspective, the best way to make sure that it doesn't get out of control is to make it so that it's pretty equally distributed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think this year... Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And once you have that, then in the beginning it'll be really expensive to run, then you can get it to be more efficient, and then over time we'll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps, and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers. But I don't know. I think that that'll augment the people working on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So, I mean, my view on this is, like, the future, people are just going to be so much more creative and they're going to be freed up to do kind of crazy things. It goes back to, you know, my daughter was, like, playing with Legos before and kind of ran out of Legos. And then now she can have Minecraft and can build whatever she wants and it's so much better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's just, like, I think it's the future versions of this stuff are just going to be wild. But... unquestionably yeah another concern that people have is that it's going to eliminate a lot of jobs yeah you know what do you think about that well i think it's too it's too early to know exactly how it plays out but my guess is that it'll probably create more creative jobs than it
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And they're like... And basically it just got to this point where we were like, no, we're not going to we're not going to take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, I guess if you look at the history of all this stuff, my understanding is like 100 years ago, I don't know if this was 100 or 150 years ago, but it was like at some point not too far along in the grand scheme of things. Like the vast majority of people in society were farmers, right? Because they kind of needed to be in order to create enough food for everyone to survive, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And then we turn that into an industrial process. And now it's like 2% of society are farmers, and we get all the food that we need. So what did that free up everyone else to do? Some of them went on to do other things that are sort of like creative pursuits or cultural pursuits or other jobs. And then some percent of it just went towards recreation. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I think generally people just don't work as many hours today as they did when back when everyone needed to farm in order to have enough food for everyone to survive. So. I think that trend is sort of played out as technology has grown. And so my guess is that like the percent of people who will be doing stuff that's like
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
physically required for humanity to survive will get to be smaller and smaller as it has. More people will dedicate themselves to kind of creative and artistic and cultural pursuits. I think that's generally good. I think the number of hours in a week that someone will have to work in order to be able to get by will probably continue to shrink.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Um, yet I think people who are super engaged in what they do are going to be able to work really hard and accomplish way more than they ever could before because they have like this unimaginable leverage from, from having a lot more technology. So I think that that, if you just like fast forwarded or extrapolated out the, the historical technological trend is what you'd get.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
They want us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV talking about how 10 years from now or something, you know, you're going to see an ad that says, OK, if you took a covid vaccine, you're eligible, you know, like for for this kind of payment, like sort of like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think the question is what you raised, which is, is this qualitatively a different type of thing that somehow, um, obsolete people. But I just think when you're asking that, it's just important to remind ourselves that at every step along the way of human progress and technology, people thought that the technology that we were developing was gonna obsolete people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So maybe this time it's really different, but I would guess that what'll happen is that the technology will get integrated into everything that we do, which again is why I think it's really important that it's open source and that it's widely available so that way it's not just one company or one government kind of monopolizing the whole thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Um, and I'd guess that if we do it in that way, we'll all just kind of have superpowers is my, is my guess. Um, rather than it, it's sort of. creating some kind of a runaway thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
One of the things that I think has been interesting, this may be going in a somewhat different direction than what you're asking, or a different take on the question, is I think one of the more interesting philosophical findings from the work in AI so far is I think people... conflate a number of factors into what makes a person a person.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So there's intelligence, there's will, there's consciousness. And like, I think we kind of think about those three things as, as if there's somehow a, Right. It's like if you're intelligent, then you must also have a like a goal for what you're trying to do or you must have some sort of consciousness. But I think like one of the crazier sort of philosophical questions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
results from the fact that, okay, you have like meta AI or chat GPT today, and it's just kind of sitting there and you can ask it a question and deploy like a ton of intelligence to answer a question. And then it just kind of shuts itself down. Like that's intelligence that is just sitting there without either having a will or consciousness. And like, I just think it's not a super obvious thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
result that that would be the case right i think a lot of people they anthropomorphize this stuff and when you're thinking about kind of science fiction you think that okay you're going to get to something that's like super smart it's going to like want something or like be able to feel and well you know that chat gpt tried to copy itself when it found out it was being shut down tried to rewrite its code
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
class action lawsuit type meme and they're like no you have to take that down we said no we're not gonna we're not gonna take down humor and satire we're not gonna take down things that are that are true and then at some point um i guess uh i don't flipped a bit i mean biden when he was he gave some statement at some point i don't know if it's a press conference or to some journalists where he basically was like these guys are killing people and and um and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think you need to be careful with these things, like what guardrails you give it. If you're telling it like... At all costs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, although the thing about... So these reasoning models, right? So there's like the first generation of models, the LLMs, right? That's what you think of as like chat GPT or meta AI or like the two most used ones. And that's basically, it's sort of like a chat bot, right? You ask it a question, it takes the prompt, it gives you a response. Now...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
The next generation of reasoning models are basically, instead of just having one response, they now are able to build out like a whole tree of how they would respond. So you give it a question, and instead of running one query, maybe it's running 1,000 queries or a million queries to kind of map out Who are the things that I could do? And if I do that, then here's what I could do next.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So it's a lot more kind of expensive to run, but also gets you better reasoning and is more intelligent. That stuff I think you do need to be very careful about how you – like what the guardrails are that you give it. But it's also I think the case that at least for the next period, it's going to take a lot of compute to run those models and do a lot of the stuff that they're talking about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I don't know. I think one of the interesting questions is like how much of this are you going to actually be able to do on a pair of glasses or on a phone versus is like a government or a company that has like a whole data center going to be able to do. And that'll, I mean, it'll always get efficient.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So, you know, it's like you can start doing something and then maybe the next year you can do it 10 times more efficiently. But that's certainly the next set of things that needs to get worked on in the industry, making sure that goes well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I'm not really an expert on quantum computing. My understanding is that's still quite a ways off from being a very useful paradigm. I think Google just had some breakthrough, but I think most people still think that's like a decade plus out. So my guess is we're going to have pretty smart AIs even before that. But... Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, look, I mean, I think that this stuff has to get it needs to be developed thoughtfully. Right. But I don't know. I still think we're generally just going to be better off in a world where this is like deployed pretty evenly. And, you know, it's I guess here's another analogy that I think about.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
there's like bugs and security holes in basically every software, every piece of software that everyone uses. So if you could go back in time a few years, knowing the security holes that we're now aware of, you as an individual could basically like break into any system AI will be able to do that too. It'll be able to probe and find exploits.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So what's the way to prevent AI from going kind of nuts? I think part of it is just having AI widely deployed. So that way, like the AI for one system defends itself against the AI that like is, is potentially doing something problematic in another system. I think it's like AI wars. That's not wars. I think it's just like, it's, I don't know. It's, I think it's a very,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I don't know. Then, like, all these different agencies and branches of government basically just, like, started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal. It was brutal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's sort of like why there are guns, right? It's like, cause I mean, there's- Oh boy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Part of it is hunting. No, no. And part of it is like, people can defend each other. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like- Anti-virus software. Yeah. It's like, I don't think you want to live in a world where like only one person has all the guns.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yes. Yes. Which I mean, I think is is part of the issue is like when people talk about trying to lock this stuff down, like I just I'm skeptical that that's even possible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Because I kind of think like we try to lock it down, then we're going to be in a position where the only people are going to have access to it or the big companies working on it and the Chinese government that steals it from them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I kind of just think like, no, what you want to do is get this to be open source, have it widely available. Yeah, some adversaries might also have access to it. But the way that you defend against that is by having it built into all these different systems.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, look... The iPhone is obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time. You know, Steve Jobs came out with it in 2007. I started Facebook in 2004. So he was working on the iPhone while I was getting started with Facebook.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I basically, you know, one of my, one of the things that's been interesting in my 20 years of running the company is that I basically like the dominant platform out there is smartphones. on the one hand it's been great for us because we are able to build these tools that everyone can have in their pocket. And there's like 4 billion people who use the different apps that we use.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And it's like, I'm grateful that that platform exists, but we didn't play any role in basically building that, um, those phones, because I mean, it was kind of getting worked on while I was still just trying to make the first website that I was making into a thing. And, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
On the one hand, it's been great because now pretty much everyone in the world has a phone, and that's kind of what enables pretty amazing things. But on the other hand, like you're saying, they have used that platform to put in place a lot of rules that... I think it feel arbitrary and feel like, you know, they haven't really invented anything great in a while.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And it's like Steve Jobs invented the the iPhone and now they're just kind of sitting on it 20 years later. And they actually I think year over year. I'm not even sure they're. selling more iPhones at this point. I think like the sales might actually be declining. I think part of it is that each generation doesn't actually get that much better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So people are just taking longer to upgrade than they would before. So the number of sales I think has generally been flat to declining. So how are they making more money as a company? Well, they do it by basically squeezing people. And like you're saying, having this 30% tax on developers by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
They build stuff like AirPods, which are cool, but they've just thoroughly... hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way. So, I mean, there are a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but it just, um,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Apple has a specific protocol that they've built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it. And it's just much more seamless because they've enabled that, but they don't let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And whenever you push on this, they get super touchy and they basically wrap their defense of it in, well, if we let other companies plug into our thing, then that would violate people's privacy and security. It's like, no, just do a better job designing the protocol. We basically asked them for the Ray-Ban metaglasses that we built.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Can we basically use the protocol that you use for AirPod and some of these other things to just make it so we can as easily connect? So it's not like, you know, a pain in the ass for people who want to use this and I think one of the protocols they've used that they built, they basically didn't encrypt it. So it's like plain text.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And they're like, well, we can't have you plug into it because it would be insecure. It's like it's insecure because you didn't build any security into it. And then now you're using that as a justification for why only your product can connect in an easy way. It's like the whole thing is kind of wild.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Um, and I'm pretty optimistic that just because they've been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things that eventually, I mean, the good news about the tech industry is it's like, it's just super dynamic and things are constantly getting invented. And I think companies, if you just don't do a good job for like 10 years, eventually you're I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, at some point I did this like back of the envelope calculation of like all the random rules that Apple puts out. If, you know, if they didn't apply, like I think, you know, it's like, and this is just meta, I think we like make twice as much profit or something. And that's just us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, it's like all these small companies that probably can't even exist because of the taxes that they put in place. So, yeah, I think it's a big issue. I wish that they would just kind of get back to building good things and not having their ability to compete anymore.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
be connected to just like advantaging their stuff because i'm pretty sure what they're going to do is like they're going to take something like this ray-ban meta you know category that we've kind of created with ray-ban and the company that built that there's like the really great ai glasses and i'm pretty sure apple's just going to like try to build a version of that but then just like advantage how it connects to the phone and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
No, that one they didn't actually connect into the rest of their ecosystem. But, I mean, look, I mean, they shipped something for $3,500 that I think is worse than the thing that we shipped for $300 or $400. So, I mean, that clearly was not going to work very well. Now, I mean, look, I mean, they're a good technology company. I think they're –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Their second and third version will probably be better than their first version. But, yeah, no, I think the Vision Pro is, I think, one of the bigger swings at doing a new thing that they tried in a while. And, you know, I don't want to give them too hard of a time on it because we do a lot of things where the first version isn't that good. You want to kind of judge the third version of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But, I mean, the V1, it definitely did not hit it out of the park. I heard it's really good for watching movies. Well, the whole thing is it's got a super sharp screen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So if you want to basically have an experience where you're not moving around much in VR, you just want to have the sharpest screen, then for that one use case, I think the Vision Pro is better than Quest, which is our mixed reality headset. But in order to get to that, they had to make all these other trade-offs, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
In order to have a super high resolution screen, they had to put in all this more compute in order to power the high-res screen. And then all that compute needed a bigger battery. So now the thing is really heavy. So now it's uncomfortable to wear. And then because of the screen that they chose,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
As you move your head, which you would if you're actually interacting, if you're playing games, the kind of image blurs a bit. And that's kind of annoying. So it's actually worse for things where you're moving around in. But no, if you're going to sit, if you're on a flight and you want to have a $3,500 device that you use to watch videos, Vision Pro is better for that use case.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. I mean, the whole thing that they've done with iMessage where they basically they do this whole blue bubble, green bubble thing. And it basically I mean, like for kids, it's just sort of like they embarrass you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
They're like, if you don't have a blue bubble, you're not cool. And you're like the out crowd. And then they always wrap it in like security. It's like, oh, well, we do this blue bubble because of security. Meanwhile, Google and others had this whole protocol to be able to do encrypted text messages that finally I think Apple was forced to implement. RCS.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think it was the Chinese government that basically ended up forcing them to do it or some other government.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, no, I mean, group chats when you have a bunch of people on iMessage and then one person is an Android are terrible. I mean, we get a ton of people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, I use WhatsApp. I use WhatsApp. You only use that. I only communicate with a few people over SMS. But basically... I mean, I build a lot of leading messaging services, so I've got to use ours. Most people, I'm either WhatsApp or Instagram Direct or Messenger. But, yeah. So I think it's maybe people are less likely to get mad at me for asking them to use WhatsApp because we make WhatsApp.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Well, there are multiple vulnerabilities in all this stuff. It's unclear. I doubt that what they did was they broke signal. Because that encryption, I think, is pretty good, as is WhatsApp. I mean, it's basically Signal and WhatsApp use the same encryption. It's an open source. NSA. NSA. Okay. But someone could break into your phone and see everything that's on your phone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
The thing that encryption does that's really good is it makes it so that the company that's running the service doesn't see it. So if you're using WhatsApp, basically, when I text you on WhatsApp, there's no point at which the meta servers see the contents of that message. Unless we took a photo of it or shared that back to meta in some other way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
That basically, it cuts out the company completely from it, which is, I think, really important for a bunch of reasons. One is people might not trust the company, but also just security issues. Let's say someone... hacks into meta, which, you know, we try really hard to make it so they can't. And we haven't had many issues with that over the 20 years of running the company.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
But in theory, if someone did, then they'd be able to access everyone's messages if it weren't encrypted. But because it's encrypted, there's just nothing there, right? It's like, I mean, they can't hack into meta and then get access to your messages. So now someone like the NSA or CIA would have to kind of hack into your phone, which, you know, there are probably ways to do that. Pegasus.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And then, of course, there's always the ultimate kind of physical part of it, which is if you have access to the computer, you can usually just break in. Right. So that's why. If the FBI arrests you and takes your phone, they're probably going to be able to get in and see what's there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, and I mean this is one of the reasons why we put disappearing messages in too because that way – I mean, yeah, if someone has compromised your phone and they can see everything that's going on there, then obviously they can see stuff as it comes in. But I kind of in general just think we should keep around as little of that stuff as possible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So there are some threads where it's like there's photos that get shared. You want the photos. But I think for a lot of threads, a lot of people just – I don't think most people would miss it if most of the contents of their threads just disappeared after seven days.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
What I find is I don't use it that much because we have this corporate policy at Meta that we need to retain all our documents and messages and stuff. But before we had that, I used it as we were developing this and every once in a while I would miss something and say, wow, I kind of wish I could go back and see that. But it was very rare.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think most communication, it's kind of like you just have the communication and then you're done. So having it be encrypted and disappearing, I think is a pretty good kind of standard of security and privacy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
You can do seven days. And you can also set it across all your threads. You can have a default timer so that way as new threads get created, your default timer just becomes the default for all those threads. So I think that it's a really good feature. I mean, I basically think WhatsApp and Signal are probably the two most secure that are out there. um, on that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
And of those two, I think WhatsApp is just used by a lot more people. So I think it's, it's generally, you know, I mean, I would say this because it's, it's, it's our product, but I do think it's, it's the better product, but, but I think WhatsApp and Signal are basically, you know, the two most secure ones.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Oh man. Um, that was kind of a crazy one, right? Yeah. I mean,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
it's always a little difficult to weigh in on these situations without knowing all the specifics, but one of the government tactics that I've seen that I think is pretty, is not great is an increasing number of governments when they like have an issue with something that a company is doing, basically just like threatened to throw the executives of that company in prison. And it's like,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I think that that's just a really weird precedent to set, right? It's like, it's if, if the, you have all the, so it's like, we're operating in all these different countries and then like, you have all these governments that are basically like, if you, I don't know, we're going to like put out an Interpol notice to like get you arrested because you're not doing the thing that we want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
It's like, I don't know. I don't, I think that's like not great. I think you want the, I mean, obviously you don't want people to just be like flagrantly violating the laws, but like there are laws in different countries that we disagree with.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So for example, there was a point at which I think I was, someone was trying to get me sentenced to death in Pakistan because they thought that, Oh, cause someone on Facebook had a picture of where they had the drawing of the prophet Muhammad. And someone said that that's blasphemy in our culture. And they brought a, they basically like sued me and they opened this criminal proceeding and
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
and I don't know exactly where it went because I'm just not planning on going to Pakistan. So I was not that worried about it, but, but like, but, but it was a little bit disconcerting. It was like, all right, fine. Like these guys are like trying to like, like kill you. Okay. It's not great. Right. You know, it's like not, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
I mean, it's, I feel like I, yeah, it's like flying over that region. You don't want your plane to like go down above Pakistan if that thing goes through. But, but that one was sort of avoidable. But the point is like, Right. to have those governments be able to exert the power of saying, okay, we're going to throw you in prison, that's a lot of force.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
So I think it's generally, yeah, I think that this is one of the things that the U.S. government is probably going to need to help defend the American tech companies for abroad. But I can't weigh in that much on the Durov specific thing because I don't know what was going on there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah. So, I mean, that's basically the journey that I've been on. Right. Started off very pro free speech, free expression. And then over the last 10 years, there have been these two big episodes. It was the Trump election and the aftermath where I feel like in retrospect, I deferred too much to the kind of critique of the media on what we should do.
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And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.