Joe Rogan Experience #1863 - Mark Zuckerberg

[Music] so your new oculus is awesome it's very impressive yeah it's very cool coming out in october um we're gonna be talking about it at our connect cons at our connect uh conference that's that's uh that's coming up um yeah pretty excited about it it's um it's so interesting the the when you put it on so i'll just describe it to people when i put it on there was an Avatar in front of me and it was an alien woman and the alien woman when i moved my mouth she moved her mouth when i moved

my eyes left and right she it's tracking my eyes when i make like a angry face like ah it makes an angry face when you go like oh open it's incredible like you can see the evolution and the progress of this stuff where it's getting to the point where it's mimicking Human patterns in a of a kind of a creepy way but it's very cool yeah so you know for me this stuff is all about like helping people connect right i mean the way that i got into this is um you know i don't know

i just started thinking about like what is the like what would be the ultimate expression of of basically people using technology to feel present with each other when It's not phones it's not computers like how do you get this the sensation of actually being present like you're right there with another person and that's to me what virtual and eventually augmented reality are all about and there's just this whole technology roadmap that you that we basically just need to go run down over the next decade to unlock that so for the next uh device that's coming

out In october um you know the there are a few big features i mean the one that you're talking about um basically social presence i mean the ability to uh now have kind of eye contact in virtual reality have your face be tracked so that way um your avatar it's not just like this still thing um but if you smile or if you frown or If you pout or you know whatever your expression is have that actually just in real time translate to your avatar i mean that's obviously like our facial expressions are just a

huge um that's like a you know there's more nonverbal communication when when people are are with each other than verbal communication you had a really good point too about uh face tracking and like uh if you're doing like a facetime call that you don't look at each other In the eye because you're looking at the camera to look in the eye and then you don't see the person so if you look at the camera you're you know you're looking up and if you look at the you know look down at the actual screen you're you're

not making eye contact with the person but this is able to recreate actual eye contact yeah with the avatar yeah no this will be the the the first time really to do that um you know i mean when we're using Technology today i mean it's it's great to be able to make phone calls and video calls and all that i mean if you can't be with someone today it's nice to be able to see their face but when you're on a video call you don't actually feel like you're there with the person right you get

some some signal some information you can see their face but um the whole time you're you're kind of trying to convince your Brain that you're actually there with them but your brain knows right it's like at kind of like a deep level yeah that that's you're not actually there with them you're just getting some information about what they what they look like and to me what what virtual reality unlocks is it it basically really convinces your brain that you're there and when you're in there You're um you know you have to basically try to convince

your brain that this isn't real right you're not present so yeah and there are all these just subtle signals um and things that either that either deepen the illusion or um or break it um that that you know each time we we do a new a new version we we just try to uh you know break down a few more of the Barriers and one of the big ones early on well the first one obviously was just like having having a headset and be able to look around and for that one of the key things

that your eye basically refreshes and i'll call it every five milliseconds or something so if you turn your head and the image isn't kind of refreshed to where you're looking within five Milliseconds then there's this huge mismatch between your visual system and your vestibular system and your your kind of balance in your ear and people used to kind of feel uncomfortable from that right because it's like a physical discomfort because it like what you were looking at didn't match um kind of as you were rotating your head so that was kind of the first thing

then we got hands and there's this whole thing that was Super interesting there where at first we wanted to you know display your whole arm um which makes sense right because i mean it's it's you'd think okay it's a little weird to just see your hand but it turns out that your your brain is perfectly willing to just accept seeing your hand without your arm as long because your hand is the thing That it's trying to manipulate and as a matter of fact when um if we kind of interpolated and got your arm positioned wrong

right so we get into these cases where your hands were here and we'd sort of guess that your your arm was like that or something and if your arm was actually like that but we just splayed it so that it was in like that you're like ah my elbow's broken but it like it felt like really wrong so it's so it's actually much Better to show a limited number of signals but get them right and then you can just add on over time so for previous versions before this we didn't the the kind of eye

contact was all just um you know ai simulated but we didn't actually know when you were making eye contact because we weren't tracking the eyes and now for for this version and um hopefully you know a lot of the different ones that we build going forward you'll be able to you know have Realistic facial expressions and um and and more translated directly to your avatar but there's this whole road map of basically how do you deliver this like real sense of presence like you're there with another person no matter where you actually are it was

very impressive because even when i moved my jaw side to side like ah it did that it made the oh face like oh it's it's really interesting and you know you were saying also that What what this the way this is tracking is you're you're doing this without putting something on your body without putting trackers on your body but do you ultimately think that that's like are we gonna go ready player one we have like a haptic feedback suit and you have to zip this thing up to get into a game and and in that

way you're going to be fully immersive or do you think that it can get to the point where it can mimic the Movements of your body accurately without you having to wear something so i i think that there will be opportunities to wear things to augment the experience further right so we already have these experiments with haptic gloves where you can like if you touch a digital object right if you drop a ball from one hand to the other you can feel the ball in your hand physically and that's pretty cool but I want to

design this in a way where you don't need that right so today there's two primary modes of doing the tracking i mean there's this kind of notion of inside out tracking you're wearing the headset and it tracks your motion it tracks your hands eventually it'll track your legs with an ai model and you can do that all with your headset and the big advantage of that is You don't need to you don't need to have a whole lot of different devices right eventually you'll be able to do it without even having controllers you'll just have

the headset the headset will get smaller it'll be more portable you'll be able to bring it around you don't want to have a setup that has like 10 pieces right i mean it's i mean maybe there are going to be times when you want to kind of have that sort of super deep experience or maybe you have it at Your home but i think ultimately people are going to just want to have versions of this that they can bring around and you know whether it's on an airplane or you're doing work at the office or

you're going to coffee shop or whatever and for that you really just want to make it work from the device so just from a pair of glasses or something along those lines yeah i mean right now there's there's kind of two the concepts of virtual reality And augmented reality are sort of on two different development paths but they're they're they're obviously fundamentally interrelated right so virtual reality it's it's kind of possible to build today red quest two it's you know pretty popular doing well hopefully the new one that comes out um i think it's a

pretty big step above it um But you can you can build that today there's a lot of new technology that we've researched that goes into that but it also is building on top of decades of advances and displays that came from tvs and then laptops and phones and some of the display technology um gets to piggyback on those decades of innovation and you know all these different companies that have done that work before Ar is a pretty different beast because you know what you really want to get to is not a headset you want to

get to something that's like a normal looking pair of glasses that is you know it won't be like a wireframe because you'll need to fit some electronics in it right you'll basically need to have a computer in there and speakers and a Microphone and batteries and a laser projector and then the display which you know we and a lot of other folks think there's going to be this technology called wave guides um which it's completely different from screens because it's a screen it's like you're looking at a thing um and and basically you're looking at

like all the pixels that are on the screen the thing that's that's different about a waveguide is it'll actually be see-through so you'll Be able to see the world through it and then it'll display holograms um and be able to place them at different depths in the world so is a waveguide a type of technology like what is a waveguide yeah it's um it's it's basically it's you know it's a they can be made of different um different substances plastic glass um you know different different substrates um And they basically get etched or printed in

different ways and there's this big debate right now where a lot of the research is going into what is the right way to basically create the these wave guides that have the right properties because you you want um for augmented reality to get something that's wide enough field of view so you can imagine in five years we're having this conversation i'm not here you're wearing ar glasses Hologram mark is here and like it's so it's not only just is it kind of working as a hologram but there's all these different dimensions beyond um just being

like a better video chat if we want to play poker you know it's like i could you know i could like deal a deck of cards and we could play hologram me um could you know deal hologram cards And you could have your glasses and physical you there could pick up the hologram cards and you can have a poker night where like some of your friends are there physically and some of them are there as holograms and it's it's actually kind of wild one of the thought experiments that i like to do is um thinking

about how few of the things that we physically have in the world actually need to be physical um You know obviously things like chairs need to be physical right you're not gonna be sitting on a hologram food needs to be physical but most entertainment type stuff i mean not just cards but games most media tvs in the future probably won't need to actually be physical things it'll just be like a an app like a we'll just have an app there on your on your wall and You know it's like snap your fingers get the hologram

there for the tv and we can have our glasses and watch whatever you want there and i don't know they're sort of limited to being rectangular now because a bunch of you know limits and in terms of the physics of how they get produced but in the future you'll just have like some you know high school students or college students developing apps and it'll just be wild like crazy stuff will just kind Of get created and so yeah so you'll eventually be able to kind of have that all come through um through these ar glasses

so are there these ar glasses are they in production now are they in development now like you when you talk about this kind of technology where you can see things that aren't there and look at maps and watch videos and have it all on a small computer that's in The frame of the glasses do they exist already no i think the we'll start to get stuff that that kind of looks like the full version of this over the next i i'd say three to five years but i think it'll also start off pretty expensive once

once it's available and then it'll take a while to work down to something that's like hundreds of dollars But there are versions of this that you can start to see if you relax some of the constraints right so the the kind of ultimate ar experience is that like okay you just have normal looking glasses that can that can kind of have all of these uh have holograms make it so you can interact with people wherever wherever you want but um If you relax the form factor constraint right so you have a headset instead of instead

of normal-looking glasses that's the other thing that's coming in the new device that we're shipping in october is mixed reality and vr right so we got to play around with this a little bit in the in the sword fighting um experience that we did but it's you know basically the the thing about mixed reality is is you you see the physical world around you um in in the Context of vr it's not happening through a waveguide it's basically happening through you have cameras on the device that capture the world and then translate that in real

time into stereo images so different images and both eyes so that way you can um because otherwise it's weird and where we we kind of see stuff in in you know 3d because we have two we our two eyes see slightly different things so you're kind of The the computers are putting that together on the fly and um and then you can overlay digital objects on top of that so when we were you know sword fighting it's like the version of me and my sword it's like that was a digital thing but otherwise it was

in your lobby right and you could see your lobby so you could start to see those kind of ar experiences starting to get built but In a form factor around mixed reality vr first so that's one one direction that i think that the the industry is exploring the other is basically looking at okay so we got to constrain this form factor because we want to have something that looks like normal glasses what's the most technology that we can fit into a pair of normal looking glasses today right so you kind of go from both sides

right it's like what's The experience that we want to have even if we can't get the form factor right and what's the best we can do with the form factor and then each year those two basically converge but on the um on the smart glasses side and we work with ray-ban to basically build these smart glasses and they're the best-selling smart glasses that that have that have ever been built and they're um you know it's well we're continuing to work on new Versions of it but they're you know basically you can get a pair of

you know ray-ban wayfarers now that um that have a microphone and that they have a speaker and they can take photos and take videos and you can post them to instagram yeah they do it on voice command yep yeah oh so you could say take a photo of this take a photo take a video and what kind of image quality are you getting off of these things um it's pretty good it's um i want to make Sure i don't get the the spec wrong and i just have all these different numbers in my head because

i i want to make sure i don't confuse it with you is it like similar to like a selfie camera like yeah limited in comparison to the back camera yeah no it's not quite as good as the as the back cameras today but it's um but yeah no it's it's like i mean you look at the the quality and it's good um and it fits in like the corner of glasses does that bring about privacy Concerns if people could just like start filming things yeah so i mean we designed it so it has a light

on it so whenever there yeah i mean that's that i think is actually a really important part of this could you put a piece of tape over the light i i mean i guess in theory but but it's um yeah there it is yeah so that little thing in the corner is that a highlight or a light uh no that's the light that's the light and it blinks and it it it's it's a Pretty active indicator um and i think if you put if you put a piece of tape over it it would probably interfere

with the camera so and so those wayfarers are essentially the same size as normal wayfarers do they have thicker uh arms i think it's ever so slightly thicker but it's within the same ballpark of uh of weight you know so we worked with the company that i mean ray bans i mean these are like some of the most you know Popular and successful glasses and you know part of the reason why i wanted to work with them is because they know a lot about glasses design and right that's not my thing right so um so

i figure okay they'll they'll really bring to the table some constraints around like okay like how big can this actually be before it starts getting too heavy on your face and uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time and i've just learned a ton working with those Guys i mean they're they're super sharp they're this you know great italian company and the collaboration has been awesome so far so i'm looking forward to building more more stuff with them but yeah you basically have these two paths to the technology at once you're you're kind of trying

to explore all the capabilities but in a device that's bigger than the form factor that you want while simultaneously you know every year or two Cranking and and kind of pumping more technology into what's the like what can you fit into the the kind of form factor that you want and you know make it a really great design and then just eventually these things converge and then eventually they'll converge and you'll get the functionality and you'll get the the kind of form factor but it'll still be kind of expensive for a little while and then

you fast forward a few years from There and then i think it'll really be a mainstream thing but even vr today is is doing quite well i mean it's um i mean i don't think we release like exact numbers on the sales but you know it's it's within the ballpark of you know xbox or playstation or those kind of platforms really yeah so when we started off this was sort of my theory on this is like all right gaming is use case number one for for vr but then Pretty quickly if you look at any

any platform right so computers phones before games are a huge part of those platforms but um if you look at the main things that people do it's really about communication because i mean this is what people do right it's like we we communicate and you know that's kind of how we get meaning in our life is interacting with other people So it's like all right that's going to happen with vr and sure enough if you look at the top apps in vr now the top few are basically social metaverse hang out with your friends apps

that are not centered around any specific game um so that kind of hypothesis around okay vr is starting to add different use cases it's going from games first games Are still growing and going to be huge to just kind of social hang out with friends be present and we're getting all these other use cases that are that are kind of crazy and are happening sooner than i thought so you know another big one is fitness right just because i mean in a way i mean these are like the first physical computing platforms it's like you

don't You don't like move around while you're on your computer i guess you could a little bit on your phone but it's sort of awkward because you're looking at the small screen but like vr and eventually are really designed to be able to move around and do things and like interact with the world and that's really important to me i mean it's like i just like i hate sitting in front of a desk right it's like i i just feel like if i'm not like active i'm i'm like Wasting my day um so i know

there have been these awesome experiences basically a couple of companies um you can kind of think about it like peloton for vr where you know it's like peloton they sell you the bike or the treadmill and then you buy the subscription and you get the the classes there's a couple of companies that basically do you know they do cardio They do dancing they do boxing but instead of having to buy a bike you just have your quest headset and once you have that you buy a subscription to to these these companies um and you can

just take lessons um and do different things and fitness and it's it's um i i thought that was pretty wild i thought that like in the long term something like that would start to happen but it happened way sooner than i Thought um which was really cool to see well if you do one of the boxing games you realize right away like this is a really good workout like it the virtual boxer when they come towards you and they're in that ring and they start throwing punches at you and you're moving your head yeah you

really wind up getting like a really high heart rate you you put out a lot of energy it's really good cardio i found like my feet would hurt Because i was pivoting and moving so much because i was like constantly like switching stances and trying to get away with from punches and as you get get further on in some of the games like the opponents become more difficult yeah it's really exciting it's fun and you get out of there and you're really exhausted it's a really good workout yeah so i mean and that's just the

the kind of nature of the whole platform and that's one of the things that i love About it but it's i mean those aren't even trying to be fitness apps right this one's fun yeah it's just that they just happen to be physical are they um capable of having two people like we we had a fencing match today you and i did yeah which is really fun are they capable of doing that with boxing now where two people have a because the thing about the fencing match that we had that i thought was really Interesting

is like you were facing one direction like 30 feet away and i was facing another direction like we weren't even facing each other it didn't even matter yeah so you could be in bangladesh and i can be in rome and we could be playing a game together yeah so i mean the the fencing demo our internal team built because we haven't released the new device yet so in order to kind of make stuff work for We kind of build that ourselves but the the boxing ones are are made all by other game developers and different

developers so and they can do that yeah there's nothing stopping them from having a multiplayer mode i'm not sure if any of them do yet i all the ones that i've played i mean i do thrill the fight and i do and i really like creed but i i do those as um as single player i don't i don't know if they have multiplayer modes but there's Nothing holding them back from doing that so i'd imagine that they will add that over time it seems like a smart move i mean we were talking about martial

arts like in terms like muay thai and and other i think jiu jitsu would be a real problem but because you'd have to physically have something to resist against but if you could figure out how to do a muay thai mode where The only problem would be things change when you make contact with stuff yeah things change in terms of like positioning and movement and what you're able to get away with and not get away with whereas with boxing boxing is pretty good for that like it's probably like the best combat sport for vr because

you don't even have to hit anything for it to feel like you kind of are yeah and when you get hit with a jab your Your screen lights up like you feel like you got hit yeah i mean for kicking with punching it's a little easier to to throw a punch and then just pull it back with kicking if you if you're not hitting a pad or something you want to like continue rotating or else you it's tough to really put yeah put your weight into it it's um do you envision a world where one

day the physical experience of The game is going to be inconsequential because everything's going to be taking place in your mind like it'll be so good whether it's with haptic feedback or some other kind of input where you'll be able to actually experience very matrix-like something that's not there i mean is that ultimately where all this is going i don't know i mean i i just think that so much of our experience is our body and not just our Mind i mean there's this strain of of kind of philosophical thought that's like okay what is

a human it's like you're it's really just your brain right it's and i don't subscribe to that at all because i mean i don't know what you're how how you feel about stuff but like i just feel like my whole energy level and mood and kind of how i kind of interact with the world is all just based on It's like it's it's so physical right it's not just you know so i don't i mean i guess maybe over time it would be possible to just simulate that through your brain but i don't believe that

we're just brains and tanks um or just brains in a body um i i kind of think our our kind of physical being and the actions that we take there are as much or i don't know that that's like just as much of kind of The experience of being human i would agree that but i would also say that a lot of people just like to sit down and watch movies and that's a very alien experience to the human body and it's something we become very accustomed to so what i'm thinking is if technology advances

and it keeps going further in the direction that it's headed now more immersive more convincing you know that uncanny valley gets bridged and all of a sudden You have a real life experience now whether this is through some sort of neural link type deal or some new technology that tricks the mind into actual experiences i mean ultimately isn't that where this is all going to go where you're going to be able to have experiences without having them and that's not to negate the beauty of real experiences or not to say we won't have real experiences

anymore but if you wanted to have a real experience we Talked about like um you know economic restrictions that would keep you from being able to fly to another part of the world well you could go there with your oculus you could you know have a very realistic 3d representation of those play like you took me to rome today i saw i got to see rome it's very cool but do you think that ultimately that is going to get to par to a time where it's the technology is So advanced that it's indiscernible that you

you would have you could have a podcast experience with me you and i could have this this same conversation right now but neither one of us be in this room yeah i think the nature of technology is that i think it's it's interesting to sort of hypothesize what the kind of extreme end state is going to be when Something becomes kind of all-consuming but i think the normal way this stuff plays out is that some things are more easily mimickable or replaceable than others so we were talking before about okay boxing yeah you could do

that pretty well maybe one day we'll get muay thai and kicking in jiu jitsu that's gonna be pretty hard right because you need like all kinds of resistance so I i mean i think the way that this progresses is like you'll it'll keep on being able to do more things really well and i would guess that there will be other technologies or other things will advance in the world that will prevent any one thing from ever subsuming everything else Um so i i don't know i mean i i also i mean maybe just because i'm

in the i'm in the position of like working on building this stuff every day so maybe it's just it's it's like like i'm just trying to make it useful for a lot of things right so to jump to like it's so useful that it's better than everything is like is sort of um yeah i'm just not i mean that's that's so far ahead of where we actually are because i'm like in the trenches every day Trying to trying to get this to work too close to it yeah but from a bird's eye view like if

you looked at where this is going it's going to become more immersive right it's going to get better it's going to be more convincing and this is the real argument for simulation theory right the argument for simulation theory is if there's so many civilizations out there in the universe and they're so advanced ultimately one Has to create a simulation it seems like that's going to happen if the the human race could survive another 100 000 years the odds we wouldn't create a really realistic simulation it's probably pretty low yeah i think the question is just

how how realistic and how good so i think that there's to me there like the holy grail is building something that can create a a sense of Human presence right it's like i mean i've spent the last almost 20 years of my life building social software um you know making it so that you whatever limited computation you have you can kind of share something about your experience and you know it started off with primarily text right when i was in college then we all got these smartphones they had cameras so then it became a lot

of photos now the mobile Networks are good enough that it's starting to be a lot more video and to me this kind of like immersive experience is clearly going to be the next step but there's this question about okay so being able to feel like you're present with someone will unlock so many different types of value for a lot of people and There's like social and entertainment there's professional i mean one of um you know i follow this this economist who basically studies that economic opportunity and upward mobility is sort of limited or varies based

on like what what zip code you grow up in right because there's different opportunities in different places but you know imagine if you didn't have to you know move to some city that didn't Have your values in order to be able to get all the economic opportunities that would be awesome so in the future where you can just use ar vr and teleport in the morning to the office and show up as a hologram and that's going to be pretty sweet right it'll unlock a lot of economic opportunity for for a lot of people is

it ever going to be a hundred percent as good as being there in person probably not but like I mean i don't know when when we were talking about about doing this conversation um you know we talked on the phone right it's like i didn't fly down to austin to talk about whether to have this conversation sometimes it's like like whatever amount of simulation you have is um you can create a lot of value even if it's not a hundred percent as good as the as the Actual physical thing um so i just view our

job as you know we'll we'll basically approach that like an asymptote i don't know if phil you know you'll never be able to do all of the things that you can do um kind of in person with a person but um we'll just be able to do more and more you know if today it's gaming or hanging out and you know over the next few years It'll be working right so hopefully you'll just be able to teleport in and and basically just show up as a hologram and work remotely and live wherever you want be

with your family um wherever they live but just be able to show up in whatever place um i think that's gonna that's gonna be pretty awesome and i think we'll be able to to do that pretty well it's gonna be a real issue for commercial real estate um it's not going to be a lot of offices If that actually becomes like as good as having a cell phone in your pocket and being able to make a phone call yeah you could just sort of teleport to work yeah it's going to be a problem no one's

going to want to work well that's a different question i mean whether or not they're going to physically want to be there rather they'll maybe they want to work but they're not going to want to go to the office Yeah i mean maybe although i think being physically being present with people feeling a sense of presence is pretty important yeah regardless of where you do it i mean i've found you know over the last couple of years the way that stuff that the work has been done has changed a huge amount and you know it's

there are all these things that are sort of complex about the office but like i mean i see people in person almost every Day sometimes i probably do more meetings at my house now than i than i would have before um but yeah i don't know i i do think that there's seeing people in in in in person having that sense of presence makes a big makes a big difference i think so too but there's definitely a big push back now about people going to the office Rather than working from home like people would rather

just do their work from home and they're like with the internet connections as they are oh yeah and the ability to video conference like why do i have to be physically in the building in order to get my work done yeah no and i agree with that too um you know our company is actually pretty forward leaning on remote work i mean just especially some types of work especially Software engineering you can do pretty well from a lot of different places and if you're an engineer sometimes it's actually better to not be in the office

because then people aren't bugging you you kind of want like a block of like five hours where you can just work on a problem and if i don't know it's like i have this thing where you know it's i'll be like in zone kind of flow concentration working On something and you know my wife will like ask me some some like basic question and i was just like oh man it's like i just like lost my flow and yeah and it's like um and like from her perspective it's like oh not a big deal that

was a quick question just go back to what you're doing it's like no that's not how it works but it's um but so i i do think to some degree having people be able to work Remotely um is is actually pretty useful for a lot of things but i think we'll need to find this mix i think we'll need to find them back i physically run away from my wife when i have a joke idea if she's talking and i have an idea i i'll just run away i just go i got an idea i

just have to like she gets it so it's okay but yeah if i'm in the middle Of writing and she comes in and interrupts it's over yeah just gets shattered so in in some ways well you would have to have like a real quiet and secure place but i think for a lot of people the just the wasted time commuting and all that if you could eliminate that through ar or vr some sort of a whole system just the stress of life would be so much better yeah i mean that's been for me over the

last couple of years With with kovid and just kind of rethinking the the way that that stuff um has worked i think reducing the commute has been one of the big efficiencies but also being able to being able to live in different places has been nice and i spent a lot of time down in in kauai earlier on and i got like really into surfing and hydrofoiling and like i just like wake up in the morning and go do that and Then just be really refreshed and go do my full day of meetings which is

obviously not something i could do in in palo alto yeah um so i don't know i'm pretty positive on all this i think if you can give people the ability to get their their kind of fluid state like flow state work um remotely but then also just be able to Kind of in a second teleport to a place and show up as a hologram and be present i think that's pretty valuable now there that doesn't replace everything right i mean you're i mean one of the things that i found is for you know larger meetings

one of the most useful things is not actually the meeting itself it's just getting a chance to catch up with people before and after the meeting right when you're in the hallway or something so so you Know yeah i mean there is there's a downside to being so efficient about being able to teleport in and out too because you you can kind of miss some of those casual downtime moments but um but overall yeah i mean i think it's just gonna it's gonna create this kind of crazy amount of of of efficiency there yeah i

think people are still gonna crave real world experiences no matter what you know obviously uh i do stand-up comedy so Obviously that experience you must be there yeah that's part of the fun is being in the room with people but i could have i can envision technology improving to the point where you could create a virtual comedy club and you would see all the different people that have the headsets on in the room yeah and you would get probably get pretty close like there was a lot of people that did zoom stand up during the

Pandemic and it was awful because there was no audience they were just basically doing their act with no crowd like don't don't do that yeah don't do that yeah you need the feedback it's it's super awkward just doing public speaking and not having any feedback well if someone's just doing public feedback there's like some really great podcasts where people just like bill burr just talks to himself it's just him ranting about life And stuff and it's great he doesn't necessarily need someone to bounce off of but comedy is a different thing like comedy by itself

with no audience is not good yeah so there actually there is already at least one experience like this that i'm aware of so we have this horizon social platform and people can build worlds in it it's like it's it's pretty simple today but it's designed to be This really easy world building platform and people can go in and build stuff and people built this thing called the soapstone comedy club and this is actually one of one of the stories that i've heard of people using vr that i think is really touching so there's this woman

who who basically who lost her son and um was really sad and was grieving for a while and comedy was just a really important outlet for her But she had a lot of social anxiety around going and physically being in front of people and performing and doing it at a club so she started doing it at the soapstone comedy club and you know had a little bit more anonymity because it was in it was in virtual reality but she could feel a real sense of presence of other people there and i mean talking to her

about it it's like it's been You know a real important experience for her to to kind of be this creative outlet and help her get over this grieving that she's had and it's not something maybe that she would have been comfortable having the kind of full intensity experience of a physical comedy club but um but you kind of got a bunch of the way there by feeling like you were present with people there um my friend brian redband he does this thing called virtual redband where what Does he do it does like they go to

diners and stuff like that they set it up vr chat yeah so he does it in oculus and he you know has a bunch of his friends log on at the same time and they go into a room together and hang out and it's really interesting because i think that they're like to be able to have an online community where you go to a place and you all meet up and you're all like talking and hearing each other's voices Yeah and seeing the avatar moving like that alien avatar that you showed me today it's very

real looking i mean it does i clearly see that it's this animated thing yeah but i would liken it to like an avatar like from the movie avatar like the navi like there's something cool about it where it's like it's definitely a step above of a lot of these things that i've seen in the past that's moving into this much more Realistic sort of place yeah where i could imagine a lot of people just deciding like today i'm going to be a penguin i'm going to go to uh this diner and hang out with these

guys as a penguin and it's it's exciting it's kind of fun part of what's a little trippy about it is that in some ways some of these experiences i think feel more realistic than for example having a zoom call right Where you can actually see the person's face because i mean the way that our memory works it's like it's very spatial right so you know when i when i leave here today i'll remember that you were across from me and and and there's a symmetry right it's like you're across from me so that means i'm

across from you we have a shared memory of of kind of the space of the place and you know if i well i guess it doesn't quite work as the the headphones But normally you know if i um you know if if you talk it's coming from that direction um and spatial audio and kind of directional building a spatial model of things is how we make memories so you take something like zoom and it just completely blows that up because now you know it's every meeting that you have looks the same right they're like and

and also there's no symmetry right so if you're in the top left of my of my box Square that doesn't mean that i'm in the same place for you so we actually we don't have any kind of shared spatial sense of that and i don't know if you've had this experience but i just kind of feel like if i do a day of zoom calls they all sort of blend together and i have a hard time remembering what meetings someone said something in right whereas then you know if you go into vr It's like okay

you have an avatar it's obviously not super realistic yet it'll get better and better over time as the computation gets better although as an aside i'm not actually convinced that even when we have photorealistic avatars that people are going to prefer that to the expressive ones but that's that's kind of a whole separate tangent that we can go down i think you'll you'll clearly want the ability to do both have a Photorealistic one and an expressive one um but yeah i mean if you're sitting around and you know someone's a penguin or or your friends

are clearly cartoony but you're sitting around a table and you have a shared sense of space and you know your friend is to your right which means that you're to their left and when they speak you hear it coming from that direction you actually remember the spatial sense of that in the same way That you would a physical a physical thing which i it's just kind of getting all those details right over time um i just think that there's i mean this to me this is like some of the most exciting work that i've gotten

to do in a while because um i just feel like building social experiences on phones is so constrained right in some ways It's awesome because there's like billions of people that have phones so i can you know we can build services that get used by billions of people around the world and that's obviously rewarding and it's in its own way too but like having the ability to define what these next platforms are going to be and have them break out of these boxes that have been really weirdly defined right in terms of Like these things

phones computers they were not designed for com for basically communication and interaction they were designed for kind of work and um in certain computational workloads and so a lot of what i'm trying to do is like okay well what does it look like to design the next computing platform in a way that's like really people-centric so if you were doing it in the way that like our brains worked and how we actually Process the world and how we think about stuff and what matters to us i don't think you'd build a platform that was designed

around apps you'd build it where the fundamental um unit of how you interact is is around kind of people and how you express yourself and um and you'd want to be able to like have an avatar and an expression of your identity and be able to just jump between a bunch of different experiences rather than have Everything be so siloed so um i think that this is it's just like it's a it's pretty wild to try to build this all from the ground up because it's just this incredible breadth and an amount of technology and

i mean i often get criticized because we're we're investing just this huge amount in this um we're going to spend this year alone more than 10 billion dollars on on all these different Research streams but the breadth of this is just like extremely wide right it's not like 10 billion is going towards any one specific thing it's like there's all the avatar work and all of how you express yourself and how you build the worlds and then there's all the vr stuff and within vr we're working on this year's device and next year's device and

the and the one after that and then in ar we talked about it's like we had the ray-ban glasses and we have sort of the Next version of that but then we also have kind of the the research going towards the full ar um and we haven't even gotten to neural interfaces yet but we should definitely spend some time on that but it's like you kind of go across all these different things and it's just this incredibly wide amount of technology that that needs to get built in order to basically build and deliver a realistic

sense of presence like you're physically there With another person which i just think is the most magical thing in the world well it's very exciting the idea that you could have an office in a jungle like you just all of a sudden we have we're going to call this meeting together we're going to be on the moon yeah you know we're going to call we're going to be next to a volcano there's going to be a bubbling volcano right next to the desk it's cool it's i mean look i love the fact that there's people

Like you out there doing it that it's it's expanding the possibilities for this stuff but some neural interfaces yeah what are your thoughts on that like where where is where is that going and where are we at right now yeah so i i think you know so go back to your comments about the matrix before i think when people think about neural interfaces or any interface i think it's important to separate out their sort of There's feedback that you're giving to the computer and then there's information that the computer gives to you and you can

separate those two things out so i actually think the the super hard part here is going to be having a computer give you information straight into your brain and that's not a thing that we're working on so um Some people i mean like like elon with neuralink in those companies i think it's i mean that's just taking this like super far off i mean maybe it'll be ready in like a couple decades and there were probably interesting use cases in the near term for people who have injuries or something like that but i think um

you know normal people i think in the next 10 or 15 years are probably not going to want to get something just Installed in their brain for fun is my guess i don't want to be an early adopter yeah i think you you want like the mature version of that not like the not the one that where it's going to get a lot better next year and you need to like get your brain implant upgraded every year so but but here's the the kind of version of this that i spent a lot of time thinking

about so You have air glasses right and how are you going to control them right i mean how you how you kind of control any any any computation devices is obviously it's super fundamental to what the platform is so you have a bunch of different modes um you know one of them is going to be voice right you'll be able to talk to it but that's not that doesn't always work right if you're in a public place or um you want to be discreet or you want to Just not annoy the people around you you

don't you know you're not going to want to dictate everything out loud the second way is going to be you know using your hands so let's say okay snap my fingers we have a chess game right or or a poker game and okay here's here's our our chess board and i i move a piece it's like okay yeah that'll do with my hands that's kind of cool but like you're not gonna be walking down the the like the Sidewalk like manipulating stuff with your hands i mean that i think already reports um yeah i mean

i think at some basic level if you can get past that just being weird um i think most people's hands will just get tired right i mean just if you hold your hands out like this for a long enough period of time eventually you want to put your hands down um So the question is how do you make it so that you can basically go and have your mind give commands to the the computer in this case the glasses um without having to speak out loud without having to wave your hands around um even though

those things will be great for some use cases you're not gonna want them all the time so the the research That we're doing it's based on the it's it's it's basically it's input only and it's focused on so it's not it's not trying to send signals to your brain it's trying to make it so that your brain can communicate with the computer and the the path that we have is it's based on the fact that we have all these extra motor neurons in our body right and and part of the reason for that is like

in case you get hurt you have Neuroplasticity you can rewire do stuff like find a different pathway to to kind of send a signal to move your finger or something there's all these different ways that it turns out our brain could tell this finger to move but we've sort of optimized um individually kind of we we kind of reinforce certain pathways and end up using one one kind of motor neuron pathway to to do a specific thing and you have all these others that are not that used so It turns out you can have a

device on your wrist that basically your brain can communicate with your hand um tell your hand to move in like a pattern that it isn't isn't used to and then the the wristband can sort of pick up those signals and translate them into completely different Things like having a virtual hand move in front of you while your physical hand is just kind of sitting there at your side so you'll be able to have this experience in the future where like you're sitting in a meeting um and you know your wife texts you and it pops

up in the corner of your glasses and you want to respond but you Don't want to like pull out your phone because that's kind of rude right um so you just kind of like i don't know twitch your wrist a little bit maybe like this like some super discreet motion um that no one even knows you're doing it and you just like send a message and that seems like a massive distraction i mean people are already distracted by their phones like when people get a text message and They're like hang on a second i just

can't answer this real quick and you're like okay and you're sitting there having lunch with someone and they're not talking to you anymore because they're looking at their phone but now they're going to be looking at these ar glasses and just thinking out text messages and you won't you won't even know that they're distracted they're just going to be not connecting with you I don't know i actually think i don't know one experience that i think has been interesting since i've been doing more zoom calls um especially earlier in that in the in kovid one

thing that i think actually was quite good or is quite good is the ability to both kind of have have everyone who you're meeting with on video chat but then also have a chat thread going with some of those people So that way like let's say there's something that you don't want to say to everyone who's in the room but you want to ask one person it's like hey can you clarify this thing that you said or right or you you like don't want to say something in front of someone it's like i have this

issue a lot because there's like a lot of confidential information that i have around the company i don't want to share it with everyone but i want to like get certain people's Opinion on stuff and if i'm doing a meeting and it's purely physical and like everyone is there i i found that you know sometimes i like have to wait until the meeting is over to go get the answer to the question that i wanted right whereas um when i was if i'm kind of having a virtual meeting over zoom or in vr and workrooms

you just you can just kind of text people while you're doing that so i Actually think that it will unlock a massive amount of efficiency and communication and expression between people to make it so people don't have to wait um until they're done doing one thing to to send a message to someone else but but yeah i mean i do think that there's a separate question about if you have glasses and you're what and you're kind of going about you know it's one thing to have vr and you put it on when you want to

go you know Play a game or do a meeting in the in the kind of fullness of augmented reality when you kind of have the glasses and you're like going about that through your whole through your life having some kind of really smart do not disturb mode that has a sense of like okay this thing really shouldn't distract you and you're doing something important is going to be that's going to be a really important ai Problem too i think to be able to kind of simulate and understand um because i don't think it's going to

be as black and white as like do not disturb on or off right i think you like you you want some intelligence there about you know routing and and kind of understanding which things you're going to want to get and which thing's not and maybe have certain people have priority like if your wife or your family is trying to get a hold of you they can get through But business people can't get through yeah yeah yeah i worry about additional distractions i mean i do not keep my children from social media because i feel like

the world that they live in has social media in it and i don't want them to be just completely disconnected from that i limit the amount of time they use their phones and i try to talk to them about the importance of not being like Completely uh absorbed in social media and these kind of things that these kids do but i i think it's a part of life and i think it's uh it's it's new and it's weird and it's confusing and it can be very addictive but i also think it's a part of life

but going out to dinner with them is so hard they just want to check their like like hey put your phone down stop snapping with your friends they're always snapchatting i'm like Stop stop doing that it's like well we got to stop that yeah it's like you just got to put it aside just put it aside but if you have glasses on that's going to be very difficult it's going to be very difficult to get people to you know especially if glasses have social media applications and also offer some sort of a benefit like a

net benefit to like the way you view life like maybe give you uh information on the amount of Calories that are if you pick up a food item like what is that look at all the calories oh my god it's got that oil in it that's not good for you or you know other benefits but also has social media you're going to come into this like sort of a weird place where you have to figure out whether or not this is a positive thing in your life or whether or not it's overcoming And you're overwhelmed

by it yeah and i think that that's something that it's gonna end up being this balance and hopefully our computers and platforms will help us find the reasonable balance on that i mean one of the things that you keep that you've said a few times is okay like i'm not sure if i'd want to do this digitally i i i think about like it's like i want to have this experience in the real world yeah i mean here's one kind of philosophical way that i think About this is i actually think when you say the

real world i call that the physical world and i think there's the physical world and the digital world and i think the combination of those increasingly is the real world right it's you know it's like there's all this additional information that we bring to the physical experiences that we have That um whether it's whether it's digital or or just from our own experience or studying that we've done that's more than just kind of the physical kind of sensation that we get um but the ratio of that may be shifting over time right so in a

world in the future where you know a lot of the things that might be physical today i mean maybe these this kind of art and sculptures and stuff that you have here maybe in the future they're Not physical maybe they're just holograms because then you can change them really easily um maybe over time the sort of ratio of the amount of physical stuff that we interact with to digital stuff shifts and becomes more balanced or something like that whereas you know historically it was all physical and there was very little kind of information or digital

overlay on top of it And now i think it's just steadily been increasing but i mean it's i think it's probably going to be a lot healthier for us rather than consuming kind of all this additional context through this tiny little portal that we carry around on a phone and you're just kind of like looking at this and you're missing the whole context i think to have it be able to be overlaid and you know have have kind of people be able to you know pop in and interact with them through it um And i

think that's gonna be powerful we'll obviously get the balance on this right but it's um but i know that's sort of how i think about it i i think like probably the right way to think about the real world is at this point is not actually just the physical world but but the physical world i'm i'm probably more kind of optimistic or believe that the physical world is probably more important to our being and essence and soul than than a lot of Other people in the industry so i mean i i really care about about

getting that that balance right i think the balance is important but i think you're correct i think there is a an ever-increasing landscape of digital world that's undeniable and it's a part of life now and as the technology improves it's going to be a bigger and bigger part of life uh i i wouldn't say my fear is but my thoughts are that we're going to lead to a time someday where people become Fully immersed 24 7 in a non-physical world and i think that's the matrix and that's what people are worried about it that as

this technology advances especially with some sort of neural interface that we're going to get to a place where we're not really here anymore or they're always like how many people are on how do you do you limit your social media use how do you do it me personally i mean i'm just doing so Many things that in practice there aren't as many hours in the day but and my my kids i haven't had to think about it quite as much yet because they're pretty young um six and five right um yeah you just turned five

um this weekend but it's um so i mean they use i actually i want them to use technology for for different things i mean i i teach them how to code i think it's like an outlet for for Creativity um i mean auggie especially i mean she max likes building things augie thinks about it as art so when i whenever like every you know every night i try to do bedtime with them religiously so i try to like end my my meetings in order to be able to put them down and and um I ask

them like what activity they want to do do you want to read or do you want to wrestle or whatever that then um or and and i'll just like i want to do code art it's like oh it's like that's such an interesting way to think about i always think about coding is like you're building something and she just thinks about it as making the computer make art so it's just like it's so anyway um i i think it's um I think it's good for them to get that exposure but i don't know these things

it's not everything that you're doing on a computer or screen isn't the same there's a lot of research into well-being that shows that there's like are you actively engaging and are you engaging with a person are you building relationships or are you just consuming and If you're if you're building a relationship then that is associated typically with a lot of long-term benefits and well-being right because i mean the the relationships that we have in our lives i i view that as like the meaning right that's like that to me is like the point and that

i think over time is what generally creates happiness for people and um and prosperity but um if you're just sitting there and Consuming stuff i mean it's not necessarily bad but it generally isn't associated with all the positive benefits that you get from being actively engaged or building relationships right and you could engage with people actively online and build digital relationships and especially as this technology improves you could actually have meaningful experiences with someone's avatar yeah so i mean it's very weird so i just Want to make it so that that the experiences that we're

having aren't just these like passive things so from my perspective there's this like you know people spend a lot of time with screens today it's you know basically computers phones and tvs and i'm always amazed because i spent all my time on phones and computers that for americans still almost half the time that they spend on screens is tvs more than more than phones or or computers so Really i mean yes i mean it's i think it might have just tipped to being um in the last few years to being you know more phones and

computers than tv but tv is huge because i know like netflix and youtube i think a giant amount of absolutely stuff is on phones uh it's a lot of yeah it's a lot on phones but it's a lot on tvs too and a lot of people are still just watching you know cable or different things like that and So when you think about new experiences i actually think the first thing that they're gonna go do is eat tv right and like and kind of the more passive things so you know when when people talk about

being worried about um you know the time that people are spending in different kind of social experiences I mean the time has to come from somewhere i think it's worth looking at where it's coming from if it's coming from sleep that's probably not great right if it's coming from exercise like i wouldn't be that happy with that if it's coming from tv i'm pretty fine with that right i think like i mean that's actually maybe a net improvement in well-being for people overall if you're shifting from this more beta kind of consuming state to just

being actually Actively engaged potentially building relationships um and there's just a ton of tv time to eat right so i i think before we worry about this kind of consuming more and more of people's time i actually just think looking at the mix of what people do today is is is good and i mean my goal for for these next set of platforms they are going to be more immersive and hopefully they'll be more useful but i don't necessarily want the people to spend more time with Computers i just want the time that people spend

with screens to be better because i mean today so much of it is like you're just sitting around and i don't know in this like beta state consuming stuff and yeah i think that that's like i don't know that's i mean so you asked me how do i control my my own social media time or my time on this stuff it's like i'm gonna do a i do a bunch of social media i do a lot of messaging um i really don't watch that Much tv and that's because i just don't have that much i

don't know i find it it puts me in this really weird mental state to unless there's something that i'm just like really attached to right so like i and i really like watching like ufc for example that's because i also like doing the sport right so it's like i have some some kind of connection to it um but I don't know just like sitting around watching it's i don't usually like get into like a lot of tv shows have you always been a very physical person because i follow you on instagram yeah i see wake

boarding and stuff you're very active like which i think is very it's a great message too it's very it's great for you but it's also a great message for other people that here's this guy who's incredibly busy he's and his life is overwhelmed With technology yet he's constantly doing physical things and using his body and exercising and getting out in nature yeah i mean i think it's something that my parents really stressed for me early on they're like my parents pushed me pretty hard they're like you're going to do well in school and you're going

to be on three varsity sports teams and like and it's just well i mean and like and you know a lot of other stuff yeah but i mean like that You don't have any debate that's it there's no that's a rule so that's like that's that's just what you're going to do so um and i'm super grateful for it i mean they they weren't very prescriptive right i mean they didn't tell me i had to do computers they didn't tell me which sports i had to do but they're like this is important um but i

don't know i mean i've found it especially as the company Has scaled and in some ways become more stressful it's like more important right it's and my sort of day is like it's all right you wake up in the morning look at my phone you get like a million messages right of stuff that come in it's usually not good right it's i mean people people like people reserve the good stuff to tell me in person right right um So but it's like okay what's going on in the world that i need to kind of pay

attention to that day or so it's almost like every day you wake up and you're like punched in the stomach and then it's like okay well [ __ ] now i need to like go reset myself and be able to kind of be productive and not be stressed about this so how do i do that so i basically i go i like i read i take in all the information and um And then i go do something physical for an hour or two and just kind of reset myself and over time what i've found is

that it's not actually just um i used to run a lot but the problem with running is you can think a lot while you're running um so i i've um especially over the last couple of years i've gotten really into things that Require full focus so um you know at the beginning of of covet i i mentioned that i spent a bunch of time in in kauai our family has a has a ranch down there and like i spent a lot of time foiling and surfing and it's like if you're foiling or surfing and you're

on like a wave you have to be you have to pay attention the whole time right or else you're going to fall and and maybe get held under and it's like not That's that's not a great experience i don't know if you if you surf but um no i don't but i tried foiling i'm an oaf i couldn't get on the thing my my young daughter is really good at it my 12 year old and she just zooms around and gets on that thing and i just i couldn't figure it out yeah it's it's um

you're talking about the efoil yeah yeah that it's I bet if you tried it for like a few days you'd get it pretty well yeah yeah i tried it for about three hours and i was like oh my god this is awful but the actual foiling not the efoil i mean the efoil weighs like 40 pounds an actual foil board maybe weighs like five to ten pounds so and after you learn how to foil flying and efoil is like it feels like you're flying a tank through the air or something but it's like but it's

Um it's a pretty interesting learning curve but it's it requires full engagement the whole time yeah um and then i mean that's sort of this is cleansing yeah yeah and this is sort of how i got into mma too is after you know now i don't spend as much time in kauai because things are ramping back up and i'm in the office a lot more so it's like all right there's there's not as Much foiling in in palo alto so it's like all right what's a thing that is both like just super engaging physically but

also intellectually and where you can't afford to focus on something else and i think to some degree it's like mma is like the perfect thing because it's like if you don't like you you you stop paying attention for one second you're gonna end up on the bottom yeah right so um So it's so i've just found that that is just really important for me in terms of like what i do and being able to just kind of maintain my energy level maintain my focus because then like after you know an hour or two of of

working out or you know rolling or wrestling with friends or you know training with with different folks it's like Now i'm ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day and like i've fully processed all the different news for the day that's that's come in and um and we're just ready to go how did you get introduced to martial arts training like how long ago was this uh it was in the last 12 months actually really yeah because it was basically i i kind of i used to just run a lot and and

just do That and then it was and then basically since covet it it's like got super into surfing and foiling then got really into mma so how did you uh how did you initially approach it like how did you get a trainer like what did you do um i you know i know a bunch of people who are who are into it there's actually this really interesting connection between people who surf and do jiu jitsu oh times yeah So um so a bunch of the guys who i who i do that with um you know

they they kind of have gyms and in kawaii and you know i've basically collected a bunch of recommendations ran them by a bunch of people who i know and um and i i ended up um i mean i trained with this guy dave camarillo Yeah gorilla jiu-jitsu yeah yeah so and he's awesome he's i mean he's great yeah super nice guy and um i feel like i'm learning a ton and the crazy thing is like i've um i don't know i mean it's it really is the best sport i i don't the question isn't how

did i get into it it's how did i not know about it until just now from from from like from the from the very first session that i did Like five minutes in i was like where has this been my whole life i like it's like all right my mom made me do three varsity sports and like my life took a wrong turn when i chose to do fencing competitively instead of wrestling in high school or something right it's like like it's like there's something that's just so primal um about it that's i i don't

I don't know it's it's and i've since then i've just introduced a bunch of my friends to it and that's been really fun because now it's like we train together and we just like wrestle together and just i don't know there's like a certain intensity to it that i um that i i like and it's it's sort of i don't know maybe it's like there's this cultural thing where where maybe a lot of people haven't considered it right but I've had a hundred percent hit rate of introducing friends to it and converting them to people

who now train every single person who who i've like who i've who i've kind of shown it to is like this is amazing this is like obviously how i should be training and working out yeah that's very impressive that it's 100 you must have some solid friends because a lot of people get turned off by the amount of effort that's involved but they get excited by the the problem Solving which is the the more fascinating part like learning the techniques and focusing on memorizing the techniques and developing the skills and then drilling like that's probably

one of the most important things about jiu jitsu that people don't do enough of is drilling like i made my some my biggest leaps in martial arts from like blue belt to purple belt just through constant drilling i was drilling all the time with my friend eddie bravo so we Were always working on techniques and so i was able to like progress much quicker and then i noticed when i stopped doing that later my progress kind of stagnated it's like there's a there's a real clear correlation between the amount of energy you put into drilling

and and uh observing the technique and then just going through the motion with like someone offering like 20 percent 30 resistance it's just not as Fun like sparring is the most fun like you immediately want to just slap hands and start rolling it's fun yeah yeah i don't know i mean i'm i'm i mean i really trust dave and i'm by so i think it's also your deb's great yeah and um and i'm also just depending on what's going on in in my life and work that day like some days i like have the energy

to go spar and some Days it's good to just go drill and yeah and you know it's like all right there's a lot going on there's um you know i it's it's better to just go do something both things are important both things are important but if you can force yourself to drill more than you spar you'll get better yeah it's really important it's like the most important thing and it's the thing that people do the least of Because like you to really like carve those pathways in your mind like when someone is in this

position you do that and then you immediately get your knee in position and you shift your hips it's just it gets driven into your your programming so that in the flow of an actual rolling session it just happens yeah you see tom hardy just won a bunch of [ __ ] tom hardy is like an ass kicker him and Mario lopez are out there competing in jiu jitsu tournaments like this is wild and they're both like beginners they're both like blue belts i'm like that's incredible well maybe i'll get there for my 40th birthday you

should do it bourdain did it he did it when he was like oh god i think he was like 60. i just think it's i do a lot of stuff like this with friends but i also just find like wrestling around With friends is fun yeah it's awesome yeah wrestling is fun jiu jitsu is even more fun because it's like wrestling with like finishes yeah yeah i'm excited that you're into it it's really cool and i think um you know it really enhances your enjoyment of watching it on television because yeah you know what's happening

but there's also like a lot of good parallels i think in philosophy for life and Work and all that i mean i think i mean both surfing and foiling and jiu jitsu mma it's like i think it sort of teaches you about like the flow and momentum of things and i think business is like this in a in a similar way where it's like the hardest thing is knowing when you're in in a position where you need to push through versus sort of developing the intuition for When like all right when like the momentum is

just going in the other direction it's like all right you're not gonna be able to pump over this swell um you know it's just it's you know if you keep your weight in this direction you're going to get swept right it's i i do think i mean it's it's a super concrete thing i think one of the things that's sort of frustrating running a Company is like the feedback loops are so long right um it's like all right so i showed you the you know the pre-release version of the new vr headset that we're building

it's like we've been working on that for years and and now it's like so basically the ideas that went into that and there's obviously a lot of problem solving even up until now to kind of get it to work well but the basic principle is okay what what like big features are We gonna prioritize um i mean made those decisions years ago and we're not going to know if that's right until maybe a year from now until we see how that goes so there's something that i think is is sort of it's difficult in running

an enterprise of of of that scale to like try to learn from things that's such a long Like such a kind of a long interval and it's something that i just find super rewarding is having these parts of what i get to do on a day-to-day basis where you're learning about like you get to push on the world or push on other people and get to kind of see how that goes like a second later instead of four years later right right um it's a guard am i gonna be able to like go um turn

that direction on that wave or am i just gonna get swallowed right so it's um I don't know it's i think that having that mix in your life is uh it it feels really important and healthy to me and i'm gonna try to get my my friends into it mean my kids do do jiu jitsu too i just think it's like really important that they kind of develop all these all these skills and appreciation for doing physical things just like my parents taught me but i don't know it's i guess overall it's like a big

part of I don't know it's a big part of what i of who i am i think i mean going back to the other conversation about like are we just brains and tanks it's like no because this is like the part of you know my life that i think is it's like this is super fun like the like the the building things it's like that's super engaging too it's just it's like a very different type of of intellectual exercise what's also the One-on-one physical connection with a person i would imagine that your life has got

to be very bizarre because you are the head of this enormous platform and you're dealing with so many human beings and so much negativity and positivity and all kinds of fires that you have to put out and all sorts of chaos and to just have one thing one person right in front of you it's probably really good to sort of Clean the pipes out and just like clear your mind and have your ability to focus on things sort of like put into perspective yeah that it's got to be very unman i mean i don't know

i've talked to people about this before whenever people talk about like social media sites and they're doing this and they're doing that i'm like could you imagine trying to manage at scale five billion people or whatever it is How many people are on facebook right now um facebook is almost three billion but across our different properties it's like a little more than three and a half billion so many people yeah that's impossible like no one can manage five million people yeah or three billion people or a billion it's like the numbers are just they're so

absurd that it's so preposterous it doesn't make any sense So like i would imagine that for your mind the amount of pressure that's involved in just maintaining it's like it has to be like looming over you at all times in the background like it's probably very difficult for you to find things that filter that out yeah i mean there's always stuff to work on right so i think a big part of Trying to push forward is maintaining enough control of my time to push on the things that like i believe need to be advanced for

the future rather than being reactive like if if my day is primarily consumed with just reacting to things that people are throwing at me i mean i can spend all of my time a thousand times over just reacting to all the things that people Throw at me and i still wouldn't get through the whole list right um which by the way i mean i think that's probably a somewhat extreme version because i'm running this company but i actually think this is probably true for everyone i think pretty much every person i think has a lot

that gets thrown at them and you could spend all of your time just reacting to that and i think a lot of what kind of creates the ability to be successful long-term and To build things and change your life and build products that change other people's lives is um carving out the time to to do stuff that's proactive and that's both taking care of yourself right and and kind of and being physical and getting out there and also getting to spend time with my family and my girls and all that um but it's also i

mean i could i could Spend all of my time um you know just working on the things that we've already built and not trying to advance this vision for the future but balancing that is important it's like i also spend a ton of time on on all the social media pieces of what we're building i mean it's like they're nowhere near done right and there are some awesome evolutions that Are happening there with with um enabling more creators um and enabling more people to have a voice there i mean the the creative economy has sort

of exploded over the last few years and i think it's just at the beginning of like sort of hopefully remaking a lot of the economy for the country in the in the world so that way more people can pursue creative endeavors i think that's just gonna be one of the most positive trends Um that comes out of you know this decade so i agree with you 100 on that it's really an amazing time for people to be able to carve out an alternative living yeah and to do so through social media platforms and there's so

many people like using all the platforms that have developed these followings and started businesses and whether it's in fitness or you know there's all there's people That are just chefs that like they cook online and they share and sell recipes yeah it's amazing yeah i mean and one of the things that that i really admire about what you do is you know it seems like you have a real commitment to giving a voice to a lot of different types of people right it feels like a big part of your your theme is um you know

you you have a lot of people on The show who wouldn't just nowhere like no chance that they get the exposure that they get from from talking to you elsewhere and you know part of the the question that i wonder about is in instagram and in facebook you have your follow graph right you have your you know the people you choose to follow and you have your friends but can we build ai systems that can also just help recommend better content that you didn't know to follow yet because It's it's kind of intere it's it's

you know it's up your alley it's like aligned with the type of things that you care about your values your interests right um and i just view that kind of confluence of building it's a very specific ai problem it's not like this kind of general intelligence ai problem but you know i tend to think about things in terms of you know more specific problems that you can break down and and try to deliver value for People but but i think you know i just love it if in a couple of years a significant not the

majority but a significant part of the instagram and facebook experiences we're basically highlighting different creators who you might be interested in but might have not otherwise seen and i think that that would both be good for people um Who who are using those experiences to ex like discover more people get get more diversity of input into their lives but also i i think can help push that that creative economy forward it's i don't know that's one of the things that i'm i'm super passionate about right now well that having an algorithm like that could really

help like one of the things that uh spotify does really well is suggest new music yeah so if you like I love how they do that where you've if you like a certain kind of music and you develop these uh playlists they'll start recommending you music and i found out about so many different bands that i would never know about before i think it's really yeah the the the thing that gets people with algorithms is that algorithms today have this negative connotation to them and people there there's a lot of argument that algorithms Cause dissent

and cause arguments and cause strife and that people are focusing only on the things that upset them but the real problem with that is that they're not taught how to think and focus on things because what the algorithms pick up on is essentially what are you spending the most time on well if you're spending the most time on carpentry and parasailing and Deep sea fishing that's what the algorithm is going to recommend to you like my friend ari we went through this experiment where he only googled puppies and he only youtubed puppies and that's all

they were recommended him like youtube videos was all just puppies and he's like see like all this stuff that people are saying like oh the algorithms are tearing us apart like no we're tearing us apart the algorithms just highlight the things that you're Interested in it's not like the algorithm some tricky program designed by the communist government to try to get you to argue with each other no you're you're arguing you like to argue yeah i mean i i think that the algorithms can also obviously be designed better or worse so you know one of

the things that i'm pushing on a lot right now is um there's this idea in designing Recommendation systems of explore verse exploit in in that it's like okay if someone has spent a bunch of time you know searching for puppies you know they like puppies so if you show them a puppy video they'll probably engage with that but if you only show them puppy videos over the long term you're missing an opportunity to understand what other things that they're interested in so even though it might not be Kind of ideal for the experience today carving

off you know five percent 10 of of basically the experience to just try to expose people to different things to see if they if they're interested in that too ends up paying long-term dividends so i i do think that like these systems done well if you design them with a long-term perspective and you're not just trying to kind of maximize engagement today but You're really trying to understand what people care about and who people want to become and what their values are i think you can you can build some stuff that gets that gets really

good over time but but i i do think that the design of the system and and the values that go into it matters quite a bit too i think so too i'm i'm i'm not um i'm not neither pro nor con algorithms or recommendations i think It's a fascinating aspect of social media but um i do think that there are certain people that unfortunately when they get excited about a thing or when they start going online they they generally they gravitate towards things that irritate them and upset them and that's the the big concern that

many people have with algorithms and with with the use of social media twitter in particular is That people are it's that people are using it and getting upset and it's creating more tension and more of a divide yeah i mean i think it's interesting to think about these services not just in terms of the information that is conveyed but you know as a product designer a big part of what you're designing is the emotional experience that people Have using it so like i just don't want to build something that makes people super angry right right

um and i think that these things have different charges to them right i mean twitter i agree it's it's like you're on it and it's it's the the plus side of it is that you get all these people who are super witty and are saying super insightful things But a lot of them are very cutting right and yeah and like and i find that it's it's hard to spend a lot of time on twitter without getting too upset um on the flip side i think instagram is a super positive space it's almost like i think

i think some of the critique that we get there is that it's it's very curated and and and potentially in some ways overly positive but but it's um But i think the energy on instagram is is generally very positive and it's easy to spend time there um and and kind of just like absorb a lot of the positivity i think that's true but how did that happen well why why is the instagram generally friendlier i mean so i think that it's the design of the system but it's um But one thing is i think images

are a little less cutting usually and and kind of critical than um then text i think the news in general is often negative i think the incentives of the news industry are often to to um well i think i think just the mission of the news industry is to kind of you know speak truth to power and highlight Things like hold people accountable so i think that even if you're looking at it from that perspective i think a lot of the stuff is like it's generally has this very critical tone to it and but like

with everything there's just a balance if you spend your whole life living in criticism then that's super negative um but i think that you know what we've tried to do with facebook is have a little bit Of both right but facebook has images and videos but it also has news and the part of it that's probably the most critical where where we probably have the most controversies around the more newsy type stuff the more political type stuff and over time i mean i've generally just felt like hey that's not even what people in our community

tell us that they want right people say that they come here because they want to connect with other people and Explore interests and um so i just want to emphasize that more of it but but like there are some very intentional decisions that that you can make in terms of designing this stuff so for example now on facebook when you're reacting to a post you in addition to liking it you know you Can you can heart it you can like give it kind of an angry emotion and one of the decisions that we've basically made

is if someone makes if someone kind of gives an angry reaction we actually don't even count that um in terms of whether to show that to to someone else or maybe we even discount it right so so it's if you could you Could kind of view it as okay someone chose that they that they like were interested in this post and chose to give an angry reaction but we just don't want to amplify anger right that's like not what not not what i've kind of view us is here to do so we're just going to

basically take that signal and like not use it to to show to show the post tomorrow so how do you do that like how do you decide like what if it's anger But it's justifiable yeah i think that this is that's exactly the right question um is is basically you know when when when i was making that decision internally um a bunch of teams were like well you know there is a lot of stuff that's wrong in the world and people should be angry about that it's like yeah i think that's probably that's fair But

i'm not here to design a service that makes people angry right so like so i kind of think that there's a balance and it's not like there's not going to be any angry stuff i mean people can still react and say that something is is negative if they don't like it but but i don't view our job as is going and you know needing to kind of amplify all that stuff so why do you have the option to have an anger Response well i think it's good for people to be able to convey it just

so is it like a thumbs down yeah it's like an angry emoji angry emoji face and so obviously there's the option to have angry comments which is just people's ability to express themselves yeah yeah but we basically choose to if someone likes something or if a friend chooses to share something we use that as a signal to say hey this might be something that you're interested in Because someone reacted to this right it's like a friend had had some kind of emotional reaction to this and thought it was interesting enough to engage with so you

might also think it's interesting to engage with but we we try to intentionally mute the the kind of angry reactions just because that's just not what i'm not what we're trying to try to do in the world i appreciate that what what do you think about the argument that algorithms in general because the Fact that they sort of appeal to human nature like they they amplify the things that you're interested in and unfortunately people are interested oftentimes in things that upset them do you what do you think about the argument that this is too whether

it's too influential or it has too much impact on people and that a better solution would be to just let everything exist how it exists And don't have any kind of algorithm and let people find what they find and share what they share and just let it exist in sort of the free market of ideas yeah so we actually started there right because at the beginning we didn't have the technology to to do this kind of ranking and the very first thing that you run into is if you don't do any kind of ranking The

system gets gamed in different ways so if you're not ranking anything the most recent stuff shows up at the top so okay so what do you get you get a bunch of businesses that want to make sure that you see their stuff so they just post constantly they post like 50 times a day so that way they've always posted something within the last 10 or 20 minutes that way it's always at the top of feed The other thing that you get is like you miss obviously really important stuff all right so like my cousin is

pregnant and when she has a baby she's going to post about that and like that post better be at the top of my feed because i don't want to miss that right it's like i i want that update and like and we know that that's valuable even without knowing the um even if we don't understand the the kind of specific content of what what what She posted there's going to be a ton of people commenting congrats and and you know a ton of hearts and positive reactions that's the question there like how does that yeah

enter into the algorithm like if if you're going to favor something like your cousin's baby being born how would you go about doing that and how how do you how does the the ai figure out that your cousin just had a baby and that this should be in all the People that follow her should be in all their feeds because they would want to know yeah she has a baby yeah i mean i think a lot of it is just there's a lot of signals that go into it but at a simple level you can

kind of just look at um who are the people who you care about and what do they find interesting so what are they commenting on what are they Clicking on what are they they liking or harding um those are some of the big signals right and then there's there's some kind of content-based stuff like we have a sense that you're interested in this type of thing or that you really hate politics or whatever so we're gonna show you a little bit less of that but in general the thing that will differentiate that cousin's baby was

just born post is that even if our system has no idea What the post means that post will almost certainly just have a ton of likes and comments on it that have a positive reaction so that will just tell us okay if your friends made you know 500 posts today that's the one that has the most the most kind of positivity around it we should probably show that more prominently so I think at a basic level a system that didn't do that stuff would clearly be an inferior system right you like you don't want businesses

spamming and you don't want to miss obviously important stuff could is there a way to stop businesses from spamming that you you could just limit the amount of times they could post in a day um i mean there are a bunch of things like This that we've tried over time i mean we um i mean but then you yeah i mean you start getting into some things that are basically pretty algorithmic or rules based which is like you know you um [Music] you you start trying to you know rank stuff based on the kind of

quality of the posts right or like or Sort of how much how much engagement they they make i mean i guess you could tell people they can't they can't share more than this amount and but i don't know it kind of feels to me like you want to you want to create a system and there are certain creators who do pump out a large amount of content and i'm not sure that you want to stop that right i think you just want A system that can basically titrate it and show people the amount of it

that they're interested in it's such an immense responsibility and the fact that it's a private company in some ways trouble some people because you have this ability to control the flow of information and that's really never existed before where there's been like obviously social media is very new that's never existed Before and then having a company that's run by human beings that have the ability to decide what gets broadcast what gets its signal amplified what gets suppressed all that stuff is very it's it concerns a lot of people because it's basically just individual human beings

with their own biases and their own perspectives and their own view of the World and they have the ability to either slow down or ramp up or suppress or amplify so many different ideas and in turn that can literally shape the way the cultural narrative goes on any given subject what it what is it like having that kind of responsibility because it seems to me that that would be an immense burden that that would be like a lot of thought would be involved in like what Are the negative consequences of the choices that we make

what are the positive consequences of the choices we make because you know as you said you're controlling the the signal of three plus billion people that is so astounding to even say well i think the important thing is that i don't exactly look at it the way that you said i i view our job as empowering people to be able to express what they want and get the content that they want and Whenever we try to exert some kind of opinion that's different from what people want our products do worse and we exist in a

very competitive space i mean we have tick tock that's growing incredibly quickly um there's a whole lot of other companies we've talked about twitter before you talked about snap um youtube is huge and people spend a ton of time on it and There's just like new social products all the time so if we don't empower people and help people get what in advance their own goals then then we lose over time so i i just i i kind of think that that you know obviously serving a lot of people is a big responsibility and we

take that super seriously but we also appreciate and respect that this is like A very competitive marketplace and our role in it is not to kind of imprint our opinion but to empower people and and that's sort of the ethos where we started the company is i mean the initial you know mission statement is you know give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected and we've evolved that over time to and now making it around Building community and bringing people and bringing the world closer together um but it's but

it's fundamentally that that notion of giving people the power and empowering people is like really deep in the ethos of the company and i think whenever we mess that up which we do frequently um we we pay the price for it and and people don't like those things that we do and then we have to we have to run them back Well that goes back to managing at scale right because you're just dealing with so many different people but what i'm what i'm saying essentially is like i i do agree that you are giving people

the ability and the power to express themselves and if you don't do it correctly they're going to go to the competitors but it's still an immense responsibility if there are choices being made as to like what gets amplified what gets Suppressed what gets removed from the platform and i'm sure there has to be some pretty intense conversations about how this is managed and handled and the burden of that must be tremendous yeah i mean there are a lot of different parts of what you just said i mean i think in terms of kind of helping

people discover the things that they want i think that's a pretty different wing of what we do than The policy setting of what is not allowed which i think is is in a lot of ways i think a more controversial piece because in the what's not allowed you have to get into the nuances of specific types of content whereas in terms of the the recommendation systems you you kind of want to build those to be agnostic of the type of content right it's like i i don't like if if i see That a team is

is trying to promote some type of content over another they're almost certainly doing something wrong that is going to make us worse than a competitor in terms of effectiveness of our product because you should just build this technology in a way that is agnostic and lets people express the interests and things that they want and and gives them that um and then every once in a while i think There are some editorial decisions that often they're important enough that i have to make them right like that thing that we talked about before which is like

i just don't want there to be as much anger so we're gonna like not take into account the angry reaction you know it's probably the case that there would be more engagement on the platform if we didn't right it's like people are expressing something and we're choosing to not listen to that thing um so at Some level it probably makes the product somewhat less engaging but that's an example of an editorial decision that it's like at some level you know we're here not just to focus on what content people see but the kind of emotional

sense um but i try to make those very few um just because the technology can enable A vast breadth of interests that different people have and i think part of how you build something that can serve billions of people is by not telling people what to think right and and basically having humility and basically i don't just valuing humanity and like in valuing that people can believe different things and that those beliefs are probably grounded in real lived Experiences that they had and aren't the result of them being tricked or something like that it's like

they believe what they believe for a reason and like and it's kind of good to generally let people express that um i don't know that's that's a pretty deeply helped belief that i that i have one of the things that's got to be bizarre about having a platform like facebook is that you know that there are Foreign actors that are utilizing the platform to either spread propaganda or to start arguments or you know we read once that i think it was 19 of the top 20 christian sites on facebook were run by a troll farm

i didn't see that one it's see we can find it it's pretty crazy the amount of resources that are put into creating fake pages or pages that don't really Represent real people but promote certain ideologies or certain political agendas and that they'll use these and start arguments with people and and you don't even real the people think they're arguing with real people and they're reading the opinions of real people yeah meanwhile there's a guy with a bank of phones in macedonia yeah no so we call this heritage um 19 of 20 christian facebook pages are

fake Yeah so so we call what you're talking about coordinated inauthentic behavior so basically these coordinated authentic behavior so it's basically coordinated right it's like yeah yeah some of these some of these policy acronyms that we come up with they have to be very specific but um but basically We have a team of hundreds of like counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence people who basically try to look for these different signals to find and like you said a lot of this is i mean that one that that you were just mentioning i i don't know who is who's

behind those fake pages but the macedonian troll farms were basically a bunch of spammers who who created fake pages and they wanted people to click on them so They can make money from the ads so that one's actually pretty easy to disrupt because you just make it so that they can't use the ads to monetize anymore and their whole economic incentive goes away and they sort of dry up dealing with nation states is a lot harder because they're more kind of ideological or you know sovereignty motivated um so there i think you you just kind

of need to Be very village vigilant and and it's it's more of an arms race and you just kind of are building up better technology for defense and you assume that they're going to keep on getting more sophisticated and you keep on needing to get better but i mean at this point we have like it's like tens of thousands of people working on this at the company i think we spend like 5 billion dollars a year was the last stat on on sort of all this community integrity work i mean it's like like our kind

of defense budget it's like i mean just to put the numbers in perspective you call it defense budget i mean it's basically it's like i mean it's it's um [Music] to defend the integrity of the of the Community but it's like it's i mean it is i think bigger than than the defense budgets of probably most countries but but it's um it's um it's and this is obviously a super critical part of what we need to do but then you know there's also this important set of philosophical dis discussions which is like all right so

i think almost everyone will agree that like that's bad right like you Don't want um you know countries basically creating networks of bots trying to convince people of stuff you don't want terrorism where you don't want child pornography like you don't want people inciting literal violence um but then the question is okay so you build these capabilities to try to find the stuff and it's a combination of of basically humans really Expert humans and really powerful ai systems working together but like sometimes they get it wrong and like and then we end up taking down

accounts that we weren't supposed to take down and and that sucks right because then we're kind of getting in the way of people expressing legitimate things and there's you know no system is ever going to be perfect so the question is you know do you want more on a false positives or false negatives Do you want do you want there to be more kind of fake christian pages or do you want to accidentally take down um i don't know what was the um uh example recently of like the the the comedian who had a profile

photo that had a kind of a gun in it and and the um um that we accidentally took down the this guy's page that we were talking about this before uh oh kill tony yeah yeah yeah the kill tony podcast yeah so it's like all right so some some like ai System just like all right like that's clearly violence right it's like the profile picture like literally has a a kind of rifle sight and a gun that shows the guy dying um so it's like so i mean that sucks like i mean this is some

of the stuff that i mean this like hurts me right because like when we when we take down something that that we're not supposed to i mean that that is like I mean that's the worst i mean that's like discern like how like say like these christian facebook pages i i don't know how they found out that 19 of 20 were fake but if someone just says i am bob smith and they post as bob smith and they have a photograph and they but really what they're doing is trying to uh talk [ __ ]

about joe biden and get people to vote republican in the midterms like how what how do you know whether someone's Real or not like this is the big argument with elon and twitter because elon asked twitter like what percentage of your website is filled with bots and they say five percent and he says i don't believe you i think it's higher and let's find out how you've come to this conclusion yeah and you know they're i believe they said that they just took a hundred random twitter pages and looked at the Interaction and there's some

sort of an algorithm they applied to it but how do you discern yeah so i mean i think estimating the overall prevalence is is one thing but i think that the question of looking at a page and is this page authentic i think that there's a bunch of signals around that one of the things that we try to do is for large pages we try to make sure that we Know who the admin of that page is we don't necessarily if you should be able to run an anonymous page you don't necessarily need to out

yourself and say who you are running it but we want to make sure that we sort of have like an identity for that person on file so that way we know like at least behind the scenes that that person is real um for certain political things i think having a sense of What country they're originating from i mean some of that you can do just by looking at where their server traffic comes from like is the ip address coming from romania or you know is or um because if if it's like an ad in some

other country's election then you know you probably want to make sure that that ad is is um you know especially in countries that have laws around that are are like are Coming from someone who's a valid citizen or like at least in that place so there's a bunch of i think i don't know what one theme in my world view around this stuff when it gets to some of the stuff that we talked about before is like i don't think that this stuff is black and white or that you're ever going to have like a

perfect ai system i think it's all trade-offs all the way Down right and it's and and you you could either you could build a system and you can either be overly aggressive and capture a higher percent of the bad guys but then also by accident take out some number of good guys or you could be a little more lenient and say okay no the cost of taking out any number of good guys is too high so we're gonna tolerate having you know just a little bit more Like more bad guys on the on the system

these are values questions right around what what do you value more um and and those are those are super tricky questions and part of what i've struggled with around this is i didn't get into this to basically judge those things i got into this to design technology that helps people connect right it's like and like I mean you could probably tell we spent the first hour talking about the metaverse and the future of basically building this whole technology roadmap to basically give people this realistic sense of presence it's like that's what i'm here to do

right um so this whole thing that's like arbitrating what is okay and what is not i obviously have to be involved in that because this is at some level you know i run the company and um And i i can't just abdicate that but but i also don't think that as a matter of governance you want all of that decision making vested in one individual so i think one of the things that you know our country and our government gets right is the separation of powers so you know one of the things that i tried

to create is we created this oversight board it's an independent board with that basically we appointed people Whose kind of paramount value is free expression but they also balance that with things like when is there going to be real harm to others in terms of safety or privacy or other other human rights issues and and basically that board people in our community can appeal cases to when they think that we got it wrong and that board actually gets to make the final binding decision not us so In a way i actually think that that is

a more legitimate form of governance than having just a team internally that makes these decisions or you know maybe some of them go up to me although i don't spend a ton of my time on on on this on a day-to-day basis but like i think it's generally good to have some kind of separation of powers where you're architecting the governance so that way you you have different stakeholders and Different people who can make these decisions and it's not just like one private company that's making decisions even about what just happens on our platform how

do you guys handle things when they're uh a big news item that's controversial like there was a lot of attention on twitter during the election because of the hunter biden laptop story the need yeah we know those two yeah so you guys Censored that as well so we took a different path than twitter um i mean basically the background here is the fbi i think basically came to us some some folks on our team it was like hey um just so you know like you should be on high alert there was we we thought there

was a lot of russian propaganda in the 2016 election we have it on notice that basically there's about to be Some kind of dump of of um that's similar to that so just be vigilant so our protocol is different from twitter's what twitter did is they said you can't share this at all um we didn't do that what we do is we have um if something is reported to us as potentially um misinformation important misinformation we we also it's this third-party fact-checking program because we don't want to be deciding What's true and false and for

the i think it was five or seven days when it was basically being um being determined whether it was false um the distribution on facebook was decreased but people were still allowed to share it so you could still share it you could still consume it when i say the distribution has decreased it it got Shared how does that work basically the ranking and newsfeed was a little bit less so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise so it definitely by what percentage i don't know off the top my head but it's it's it's meaningful

but i mean but basically a um a lot of people are still able to share it we got a lot of complaints that that was The case um you know obviously this is a hyper political issue so depending on what side of the political spectrum you either think we didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much but right but we weren't sort of as black and white about it as twitter we just kind of thought hey look if if the fbi which i still view as a legitimate institution in this country it's a

very professional law enforcement they come to us and tell us That we need to be on guard about something then i want to take that seriously did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story i no i don't remember if it was that specifically but it was it basically fit the pattern when something like that turns out to be real is there regret for not having it evenly distributed and for throttling the distribution of that Story what do you mean evenly distributed i mean evenly in that it's not suppressed it's not

yeah so yeah yeah i mean it sucks yeah yeah i mean because i mean it turned out after the fact i mean the fact trackers looked into it no one was able to say it was false right so so basically it had this period where or was getting less distribution um So yeah i mean i but i think like i think it probably it sucks though i think in the same way that probably having to go through like a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks like it still sucks to have have

like that you had to go through a criminal trial but at the end you're free um so it's i i don't know if the answer would have been don't do anything or don't have any process i think the process was Pretty reasonable you know it's we still let people share it but but obviously you don't want situations like that but certainly much more reasonable than twitter stance and it's probably also the case of armchair quarterbacking right or at least monday morning quarterbacking i should say because in the moment you had reason to believe based on

the fbi talking to you that it wasn't real and that there was going to be some propaganda so what do you do Yeah and then if you just let it get out there and what if it changes the election it turns out to be [ __ ] that's a real problem and i would imagine that those kind of decisions are the most difficult the decisions of like what is allowed and what is not allowed yeah yeah i mean what would you do in that situation i don't know what i would do i would have to

like really thoroughly well first of all you're dealing with the new york post Which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country so i would i would say i would want to talk to someone from the new york post and i would say how did you come up with this data like where where are you getting the information from how do you know whether or not this is correct and then you have to make a decision because they might have got duped it's it's very it's hard because everybody wants to Look at it after

the fact now that we know that the laptop was real and it was a legitimate story and there is potential corruption involved with him we we think oh that should not have been restricted that should not have been banned from sharing on twitter right i think everybody agrees with that even twitter agrees with that but the thing is then they didn't think that In the beginning they thought it was fake so what do they do like if something comes along and the republicans cook up some scheme to make it look like joe biden's a terrible

person and they only do it so that they can win the election but it's really just propaganda what are you supposed to do with that you're supposed to not allow that to be distributed so if they think that's the case it makes sense to me That they would try to stop it but i just don't think that they looked at it hard enough when the new york post is talking about it you know they're pretty smart about what they release and what they don't release if they're do if they're going over some data from a

laptop and you could talk to a person but again like this is just one story like one individual store like how many of these pop up every day Especially regards to polarizing issues like climate change or covid or or you know foreign policy or ukraine anytime there's like a really controversial issue where some people think that it's imperative that you take a very specific stance and you can't have the other stance like that those moments on social media those trouble a lot of people because they don't know Why certain things get censored or certain things

get promoted yeah i i agree and it's like to be in your spot and i was one of the things that i really wanted to talk to you about is this because like to be in your spot must be insanely difficult to have no matter what decision you make you're going to have a giant chunk of people That are upset at you and there might be a right way to handle it but i don't know what the [ __ ] right way is well i think the right way is to establish principles for governance that

try to be balanced and not have the decision-making too centralized because i think that it's hard for people to to accept that like some team at meta or that i personally am making all these decisions And i think people should be skeptical about any so much concentration around that so that's why a lot of the innovation that i've tried to push for in governance is around things like establishing this oversight board so that way you have people who are luminaries around expression from all over the world but also in the in the us um you

know i mean folks like michael mcconnell who's i mean he's a Stanford professor he's like just he was afraid which um which republican president appointed him but i mean he was i think gonna be considered for the supreme court at some point i mean he's he's a very um very prominent and and kind of celebrated um free expression advocate and he helped me set the thing up and i think like setting up forms of Governance around that are independent of us that basically get the final say on a bunch of these decisions um and that's

that's a step in the right direction i mean in the the hunter biden case that you talked about before know i don't want our company to decide what's misinformation and what's not so we work with with third parties and Basically let different different organizations do that no i mean then you have the question of are those organizations biased or not and that's that's a that's a very difficult question but at least we're not the ones who are basically sitting here deciding we're not the ministry of truth for the world that's deciding whether everything is true

or not so i'd say Um this is not a solved problem controversies aren't going away um you know i think that there's it is interesting that the us um is actually more polarized than than most other countries so i think sitting in the u.s that's easy to extrapolate and say hey it probably feels this way around the whole world and from the social science research That i've seen that's not actually the case there's a bunch of countries where social media is just as prominent but polarization is either flat or has declined slightly so there's something

kind of different happening in the u.s um but but for better or worse i mean it does seem like like like the the next several years do seem like they're set up to be Quite polarized so i i tend to agree with you there are going to be a bunch of different decisions like this that that come up um because of the scale of what we do almost every major world event has some angle that's like the facebook or instagram or whatsapp angle about how the services are used in it so yeah i think just

establishing as much as possible independent governance so that way Um you know it's i i'll obviously have to be involved our teams you know nick clegg who i appointed to be the um the president for for for all the policy issues for the company and he was formerly the deputy prime minister in the uk um the successful politician uh there and kind of very well versed in kind of government and all those political issues Um we're not we'll we'll have to do some part of this but i think also kind of getting to more and

more independent governance is is going to be an important part of how we deal with this what why do you think the united states is more polarized like what do you think is happening over here that's causing that i think that that's i mean i'll speculate but i think that there are People who have studied and thought about this a lot more um i i think there's probably a media environment issue that predates the internet right so um so i think we have sort of it it seems like i don't want to say uniquely because

it's probably we're Probably not the only country that has this but in terms of having like you know some of the news is so far left and some of it is so far right i think you know there's all this talk about filter bubbles on the internet but i mean i think even predating this like going back to like the 70s or 80s when fox news and all these other You know cable these these um kind of prominent media organizations were established and that that has had a long-term effect and people have studied that um

but there might also be something about just the way that our governance is set up where you know we have two parties right we have these primaries that basically you know make it so that Um you know it's almost like you're not promoting people who are trying to be kind of the centrist you're basically promoting people who are the extreme of their party so i think that there are really sensible reforms like open primaries right that that i think would probably have a pretty big impact on the political culture in the country and some of

these other countries that are a little bit more parliamentary by by Definition um just allow there to be more candidates on more more parts of the spectrum but i i i want to be careful about not you know talking too far out of school because i'm not a i'm not a um you know political scientist but but i've obviously spent a little bit of time thinking about this because you know i think a lot of people want to point to social media as the primary cause of this and i just think when you Look at

the fact that polarization has been rising in the us since before the internet that just makes it seem like it's very unlikely that social media is kind of the prime mover here and then if you look at the um the fact that there are all these other countries around the world where social media is used just as much yet the polarization is flat or just not growing that quickly or in some places Even going down kind of suggests that they're that that really is not the primary thing that's going on so i don't know i

mean it's it's a it's a really tough it's a really tough set of questions i think you're dead on with the open primary idea because this idea that it's only party loyalists to get to vote on either side you're you're promoting uh this ideological adherence instead of reasonable ideas That people can enjoy or not enjoy and it you know resonate with or not i think um i don't think social media is to blame but i think social media for a lot of people it accentuates the divide because it gives them more time to immerse themselves

with it and i think it's it's an unfortunate aspect of some people that they uh spend a lot of time distracted on things that don't Immediately affect them but those things become their main focus in life yeah and i think that's a distraction that's like almost like a form of procrastination that people get involved with and it just seems like a natural thing with people and it's i think it's a time management issue and i think it's a discipline issue and i think some people uh have never really Been taught time management or discipline especially

regards to the type of information that you take in they just like see something that upsets them what is that what's going on why are they doing that and then they just get upset and then that's their whole day and you know i see things as in terms of like i'm very um very careful with time management because like anything that's to take up too much time that's not net benefit That's not i'm not enjoying or is it going to want it being a negative thing i just i'm not interested and but i've developed this

over time to recognize like that's a trap get out of there like you you can't put out all the fires yeah you will be a fireman all day long there's no way if you just want to be upset at things and just engage with things that will upset you there is no shortage of news Stories there's no shortage of political issues there's no shortage of everything and you have to figure out time management and discipline and some people never do and i think that's more of the problem than social media and algorithms and all these

different things that people are blaming for our woes more of the problem is a lack of education like explaining to people that you For if you're awake for one hour during that hour it is your choice what to think and focus on in 24 hours it's the same thing you're just spreading it out you decide what to do now if you want to spend all of your time going back and forth on roe v wade on twitter good luck go do that but you're not going to change the landscape that's what voting's for you're not

going to ch You're not going to change people's opinions like if you want to make interesting videos and post them on facebook okay if you want to like talk about things and have a perspective that you think is like really well formed and it's compelling go ahead make that but if you if you get sucked into that world of just looking for things to complain about that's really you you don't have to do that no one's forcing you to do that Yeah i mean i think your point around what if people have control over is

is really important because i think the people who are happy and productive i think tend to focus on things that they have some agency over yes and um it's not that the other issues aren't important around national civic issues i mean they matter but there probably is a healthy balance Um where yeah i mean i this just goes back to the time management conversation we're having before which i mean you could spend all your day and more a thousand times over just reacting to things that are going on in the world yeah i do think

there's a really a thing around kind of narrowing The aperture to in your life to like what's around you the people you care about um [Music] i don't know i think that that does drive a lot of happiness for people and um so i think it's it's one of the interesting questions is how do we balance Now having access to like an uh just historically unprecedented amount of information about issues that are going on in other places which on the one hand drives in theory it should drive more transparency and accountability and energy towards those

things but i mean maybe that just needs to like that that needs to if that energy needs to come over a you Know balanced over a longer period of time or something like i tend to think that all the transparency that we've gotten from from social media will lead to good progress on a lot of things but i do think it can if you just focus on on kind of broader issues and not and if you don't if you don't focus a certain thing about people's happiness that has to come from you know what's right

around you in your world Most definitely i'm and that's not to say that you shouldn't get upset about important issues you know like and and express yourselves it's it's it's just a matter of like how much time are you spending on it yeah you know and unless you're really disciplined and really careful with your time you can get you can get sucked into these things and you could waste your life Like just arguing with people online and i just don't i don't think it's healthy for folks for entertainers and comedians in particular it's really bad

like i see so many comedians that get so much anxiety from like reading comments and going back and forth with people who are like talking [ __ ] to them on twitter yeah and i always tell them like don't do that like it's really bad I struggle with this too do you well i mean on the one hand some of this is pre it's free product feedback right so i mean so like i actually this is like one of the hard things about it's you don't want to be so close that you're not listening to

criticism because then you're not going to grow right but i think finding people and outlets that Will provide criticism but from a place of actually trying to help you grow rather than tear you down is very rare um somehow i struggle with this i do sometimes feel like i need to i like i do want to try to understand all of the different perspectives that people have but i think the thing that's tough is that a lot of those people aren't necessarily trying to help us Build something better right so yeah um and there is

just a lot of negativity and it like gets to you right and and i think there's a question of balance where at what point are you kind of better off it's like yeah you want to push forward on the things you believe in but you don't want to you know put on blinders and not not consider alternative viewpoints but then you could spend all Your time looking at that at critique that's not necessarily trying to be constructive and then that's just gonna be super negative for your your mental health so yeah i mean i i

i think probably a lot of the happiest and and most productive people are at least like they're i don't think you're ever gonna carve out i don't think you should want to close Off all that stuff completely but i think at least being able to carve out a good amount of your day to be able to focus on like what you want to push forward and like things in your life that matter is i think that's just really important to to like being a grounded person i think it's also important to establish an ethic where

you communicate with people online the same way you communicate with them if they're in a Room with you and i think that is not something that a lot of people adhere to people they talk to people on twitter like it's not a real human without they don't have real feelings and you're just trying to say the most biting and mean and cutting thing that you can yeah and that's that's unfortunate and i Don't i don't do that i used to engage in it like i'd used to argue with people back and forth and i realized

like what am i doing like this is not good i always feel like [ __ ] i never feel good even if i win the arguments it doesn't feel good it's all you're filled with anxiety and then a new fire uh starts up in the comments you know like someone else will jump in and then you got a new opponent and like what are you doing like well that's that's a Massive resource problem like it's it's a giant issue and whether or not you you want to focus on important things in life or whether you

want to like win these little verbal battles between people on twitter or facebook it's just it's not necessary yes it's just just for allocation of resources it's a terrible idea yeah yeah i mean what we hear from our community is that that's not what people Want to spend their time saying that there is i think that part of the challenge in designing products is sometimes what people tell you that they want to spend their time on is different from what they actually do spend their time on um i'm sure but um but i think a

lot of the time even if people's revealed preferences of What they actually spend their time on are different it's there's some truth and aspiration to what they think they want to spend their time on that like there is some long-term value in helping out with that too so that's why that's why i've just consciously tried to you know have a just downplay a lot of the political controversy on on on the services a bit and You know it's like what what do people come to our services for it's connecting with other people right i mean

there's and expressing what matters to you which i mean for most people isn't some kind of big global issue it's like something that matters in their life like what's going on with my kid's life you know how how's my wife doing you know what's Going on in my local community right and um i don't know i think that there's something that's powerful about being able to focus more on that and and be a bit more grounded in that it's not that we do that perfectly but i i do think social media tends to allow that

a lot more than previous mass media did because by definition mass media just had to focus on on issues that concerned a lot of people at once Whereas i think one of the best parts of social media is that it is so inherently local to you know just what matters to to you and your your friend group i mean what what what's more kind of local to you than like the specific people that you have relationships with i mean that's yeah that's the ability that's why that's why so many people use it very good point

and also the interesting aspect of social media That i think often gets ignored is the discussion of social issues i mean people have a greater understanding about how most people think about social issues today than we ever did in the past we were sort of informed how we felt about things based on the news based on you know the rare commentator on the news or stories that were in the news or editorials that were in the new york times or what have you and now you get a day-to-day sense of How people feel about things

and of course it's also clouded by people that are saying things to sort of virtue signal and get people to like them based on the opinion they think is going to be the most likely to attract positive attention but it at least is opening up this new field of people openly debating and discussing ideas that used to be only talked about by People that were are already approved and on television and in the media so we yeah we sort of get this particularly about videos right videos are a really interesting example that because someone can

have a really concise and interesting perspective on something and that'll get shared millions and millions of times and it just has to go viral it just has to catch someone's opinion and go wow she's got a really Good point and then that that gets out there that is really powerful and that's something that never existed before where just a regular person with an interesting idea can just catch fire yeah yeah and i i think that that's an area hopefully with better recommendation systems that will be able to be more possible in the future than has

been in the past i think as the ai can kind of help people discover things that they Might be interested in but yeah i mean i'm a little more mixed on this i mean i think on the one hand i think the comments and actual discussions that happen online um are not as good as they could be i mean i think like live interactions like i mean like what we're having now i think that's that's you know hopefully an interesting um discussion for people who are who are Who are watching but but i think if

you look at like common threads like you're talking about i think that that that experience probably needs a significant amount of innovation before it's um before it's good but but i do think being able to see different people's opinions and maybe more like the original posts than the comments back and forth um because like when i see a friend has some opinion on something like i know Where that person's coming from right in terms of their values and their life story and and that just means a lot more to me than like i don't know

the new york times telling me you know that that that something is good or or bad um and there's also a lot of diversity because people you know tend to have friends who are From different backgrounds and you know before the internet i think the average person basically you know they had a few different media sources they probably had you know each one had had some kind of specific editorial leaning and um you know now the data that i've seen on this actually is that that social media generally exposes people to a way more diverse

set of views now there is a Question about how people react to that i think sometimes when people see stuff that they don't um agree with they there's a productive way to present something that someone might disagree with in an unproductive way and sometimes if you present something that someone's not going to agree with they'll actually kind of shell up and disagree with it even more After after being exposed to that point of view so that's another area that that we and the rest of the industry might be able to improve on over time but

but i think that this notion around filter bubbles and like people only see one type of thing um you know i think it by this point has been pretty thoroughly debunked in terms of just like statistically the diversity of what you're seeing on online from different sources is way greater than it Than it ever was before i think people just don't make very compelling arguments that's one of the reasons why so few people are willing to think and listen to differing opinions on things you know it's so often people are either preaching to the choir

or shouting down at the person that has the opposing view instead of expressing themselves in a very neutral and objective way that considers all the possibilities And this is like i mean this brings me back to fact checks like fact checkers because often times fact checkers are incorrect and they are biased and there it is subjective as to whether or not what what is a fact and what is not a fact especially about you know some more controversial issues like how do you choose fact checkers like and how does a fact checker does how do

they Go through a mountain of data and come to a conclusion and then that is used for content moderation yeah so there's a whole discipline around in like professional discipline around fact checking where i mean these organizations are supposed to basically they get accredited um and they're generally i think quite professional about how they do this and yeah and and so i mean that's another Thing is you know not only did we not want to be deciding what is true or false we also didn't want to be in the business of deciding which fact checkers

are professional and not so we basically outsource that to this accreditation um that i um it's it's widely respected so as as sort of the best that there is even though it's um you know it's it's not without Flaws like you're saying but what we tried to do was basically we give the fact checkers the basic guidelines to not focus on things that could be opiniony right so there are things online that are like obviously um i don't know just like obviously kind of wrong memes or um like crazy conspiracy theories or Something like that

and i think that that's a pretty categorically different set of things than like is there some shade of to which some political candidates said something that was slightly false and like can we use that as an excuse to like ding them right so i think When the program is is working the way it's supposed to um i mean the overwhelming majority of people in our community tell us that they don't want to see things that are kind of obviously false flowing through the system right it just decreases trust in the system and if there was

a way to to get rid of that then it's like people on both sides of the political spectrum would would want that to be the case i Think where it ends up being an issue is when the fact checkers sort of veer towards getting into stuff that's not as obviously black and white and a little more political i mean not not a lot i mean a lot of the stuff that's blatantly wrong isn't necessarily even political it's just like stupid [ __ ] and it's um so and that those are the areas that that i've

seen that become the most Controversial how do you make decisions when like i i can understand the wanting to uh stop the spread of misinformation but there's certain things that are so dumb where i feel like they should be allowed to be spread like flat earth like if someone has a flat earth theory god i want to listen i want to listen because it's so dumb i want to know how does someone start to form these ideas Because there's a thriving community i don't know if you know if you ever google hashtag space is fake

i have not you should there's uh a large group of humans out there that believe that we live in some sort of a dome and that there's like essentially light bulbs hung in the sky it's so dumb but i mean like what do you do about that like if i was running Facebook i would let that stay well leave that in there so one important nuance on this though is we don't we don't block misinformation we basically just have a label that puts that goes on it that says that a fact checker says this is

false and show it a little bit less in in the ranking and news feed but don't you stop a person's ability to share Something with that that you can share it you can share it but what if someone is a person that is known to spread certain misinformation don't you make it so you can't tag that person it depends on what the stuff is there's i mean we can go super deep on all the nuances there's there's misinformation that could lead to harm right so misinformation that veers on things that lead to violence or health

safety that We treat in one way and then there's just misinformation like stuff that's wrong that people say reduces trust in the system when they see it but that we have no reason to believe is gonna lead to any like physical safety issue for people and that we just treat differently i mean that it's like yeah we'll put a label on it we'll you know if we have the choice to either show your cousin's you know giving birth photo or That we'll we'll kind of show the other content above it but fundamentally we're not going

to prevent you from sharing it or or or prevent people from seeing it you know when jack dorsey and i had a conversation about this one of the things he said that he was um in favor of and was trying to promote the idea of two versions of twitter he wanted to have a moderated twitter and then he wanted to have a wild west twitter Like you wanted to have something where it's like 4chan or something just like let people do whatever they want and just open up those barn doors and as soon as you

go in there it's chaos like what do you think about that and do you think that there is an important function of content moderation that to set a tone i mean you you can kind of see it yeah i mean Yeah i think that the tough thing is so there's like most of the categories of harmful content are things that i think almost everyone would agree on right so it's like like you don't want foreign nations interfering and stuff like that yeah like the bot networks you don't want terrorism you don't want child pornography you

don't want like blatant Intellectual property violations you don't want people promoting violence okay so you go through all this stuff i think that that's most of that stuff i actually think is not that controversial right it's like people want it gone and they expect us to you know as as a technology company that operates at scale to be able to do this reasonably well um So then i think that there's there are a couple of issues one is sometimes those systems get that stuff wrong and we say that something is bad when it wasn't or

we missed something that that that is bad so again that there's that type of issue which is like you just make an operational mistake which is important but but is kind of one type of issue then i think you get into The types there are a couple of types of issue of issues and i think misinformation is is probably the biggest one where there's actually just not widespread agreement at all about how to handle it um i think that a large percent of the population the vast majority says they don't want to see misinformation but

then people disagree on what Misinformation is right so um so people don't want to see what people don't want to see what they think is misinformation but but honestly even more than that they they don't want other people to be to be kind of to see what they think is misinformation so that's so that's pretty difficult because then different people have different views and i think that There i mean maybe you could have a policy like what jack was talking about for for that type of content i mean i don't think you're going to have

a wild west version of social media where you're just allowing terrorism free for all i mean that's crazy you have the taliban is on twitter which is really wild because donald trump isn't yeah uh Yeah tougher i'm i'm not super deep on twitter's policies so tough for me to comment on that but twitter has pornography i mean they have hardcore pornography you could just accidentally stumble onto someone you follow his page yeah so that's that's something that just is more of going back to your point around just for the community feel pornography is a thing

that we don't Allow and i think it's somewhat controversial because i mean it's it's like you could make a pretty good argument i think that like this isn't doing physical harm to people i mean i know that there's arguments on both sides of that so i don't want to go super deep on that but like but i i'd say our reason for not wanting pornography is more for the feel of the Community than than the than kind of the sense of harm and obviously child pornography is different that's that's obviously real harm um but um

but i think that's one category of of content where it's kind of more of an editorial moderation decision i don't think it's a political decision it's just it's more of like we want the feel of the service to be about people Connecting with their friends um and family and and not necessarily coming across that kind of content but yeah i mean that's sort of i think how how the whole thing breaks down i mean there's most of the stuff that that i think gets taken down actually most people would agree needs to get taken down

and then i think there's mistakes and then there's you know stuff like how do you handle misinformation which i Think society as a whole doesn't agree on so my basic approach to that is give people choice um and try it like so basically don't take it down but but basically let people share the stuff but also flag if something if if a an accredited fact checker said it might be false and also get us that we we shouldn't be the ones deciding what's true and false so kind of try to set up this independent governance

to do that i think it's a Pretty well balanced system it's not perfect we'll need to keep on iterating on it and making it better over time but those are the basic principles for kind of how i think about navigating that one thing that people freak out about and oftentimes i'm a little skeptical of their concerns is people think they're being shadow banned it's always people think they're being shadow banned like is shadow banning a real thing and What does that mean well i mean there's no policy that is shadow banning so i think it's

sort of a slang term um but that maybe refers to some of the demotions that we're talking about right so if someone posts something that gets marked as false by by a fact checker then it'll get somewhat less shown in just that post or all of their posts for the future i think that There's if you do it once then it's that and then i think if there's like some history within a page or there's there's kind of different rules for pages and groups and different things um then there can be some kind of some

kind of broader um broader policy that applies but um When i look into this stuff because i mean a lot of my friends and people i know just send me examples because unfortunately there are a lot of mistakes and i think part of the the issue is that okay if there's three and a half billion people using these services um and if we make you know a mistake point one percent of the time That's like still millions of mistakes right right so so it's like there's all these cases and that that sucks right it's like

so that's there are all these cases where um we missed something that we should have taken down or we we enforce something that we weren't supposed to but i'd say as it relates to to kind of concerns about shadow banning a lot of the time When i look into stuff people attribute some motive or like ah this is like like meta has some stupid policy in place that blocked this or they're banning this thing and a lot of the time it was either just a mistake so nothing was supposed to happen but like there was

some bug in the system or like or some system didn't work the way it was supposed to which is a real issue but it's not an ideological issue Um and a lot of the time also when people are worried about stuff like shadow banning it it actually like their maybe their post just wasn't as good or something and it didn't like and it just didn't get the distribution that they wanted it to but i don't know i mean you highlighted some Examples to me a a few weeks ago of someone who was saying that they

like couldn't follow your account or something and you posted it and it was and i mean so i like looked into it because i'm like okay i'm like i'm going to see joe soon and like i want to i kind of want to understand what these issues are and it like like that's an example where it's like it had nothing to do with your account it was like it was it was Basically there was some bug and that person had had kind of taken a bunch of actions quickly or something and like we basically just

for spam protection stop them from taking a bunch of actions but it's like so i think people sometimes read in like some ideological bent or policy thing into this that um i think often isn't there but unfortunately there just are because the Scale is so big they're going to be millions of mistakes you're going to be able to find almost any pattern that you want in that much data so i i haven't figured out how to crack that nut of kind of communicating it's also an interesting problem because there's people uh don't really know what's

going on behind the scenes so there's this like sort of in their eyes a lack of Transparency it's like how how does this all work so they assume there's nefarious intentions and that someone is yeah someone's censoring them yeah i mean how do you have any i mean i'm curious how you'd think about this if you're in my position i've thought about it um uh i would imagine it would be incredibly overwhelming and i'd probably be on xanax I just i don't know or you just work out more yeah i'd work out more yeah i

wouldn't take exactly just like but just these do you like more mma but the amount of foreign countries that you're dealing with too i mean you have facebook and how many languages well i don't even know yeah i mean it's i mean we just ruled out an ai tool that allows us to translate posts to All these languages where there are it's like just yeah it's like hundreds of i think it's more than 100 languages i don't like well i love to use that on instagram like especially because i follow a lot of jiu jitsu

guys and they'll say something in portuguese so you can click the translation yeah yeah that's there that should be there yeah no it is there it's really cool yeah i love that um it's really nice but The amount of countries that are using this yeah and talk like i wouldn't even want to just pay attention to the people that are speaking english if you're you're trying to moderate all the people that are speaking uh you know a million different languages like how oh yeah i can't imagine this one and one thing i wanted to talk

to you about is when you first started facebook you you clearly could have never Imagined that it would become what it is now like what was it like going through the stages of growth of this thing where oh great it's successful yeah oh hey facebook is taken yeah yeah holy [ __ ] we're overthrowing governments like what is happening what is this thing now yeah what it what has that been like for you to assume This position and to have this position evolve and spread and for you yourself to become this worldwide figurehead and you

know become this insanely successful person who is involved in this social media platform that is so massive it's just so beyond it now with whatsapp and you have instagram and you have me you have oculus you have all this going On i mean yeah am i freaking you're not just thinking about it no no no no no i've spent a long time yeah yeah it's like breathe deeply um no i spent a lot of time thinking about this imagine just like it's like why us like what like what what happened that we were the ones

who who who built this like me and this where's my space where'd it go so yeah you know Here's here's my my reflection on this and i'm curious for for your view on if you think this is just crazy but but like when i was getting started i remember the night that i launched the original facebook website at my college right it was just a website for my college to basically you can it was it was literally a facebook right it's like my like harvard didn't have a paper facebook and i was like this is

stupid Let's just make a version where people can input their own stuff because people like expressing stuff about themselves and people are really interested in learning about other people so let's go do that and we can help people connect around that so i launched it i went to go get pizza with my friends and that night we were talking about how it was really cool that i got this out at harvard and people Were going to use it at harvard but someday someone was going to do this for the world and it was not even

like a possibility for me that that was going to be us it was like completely obvious that it was going to be someone else or it was like like we're just college kids like who are we to do this right it's um you have like google and microsoft and you know yahoo at the time these like great technology companies that have Thousands of engineers and like all these servers and all this resources so it's like it just wasn't even a question it wasn't even a hope that i had that we would do it but then

like okay so we just kind of kept going right so i launched it at harvard and then what year was that 2004 and a bunch of students from other schools started writing in and Um as soon as i optimized the code and basically got i could make it set i could i could run this at more colleges at the same time i started launching at more colleges and like launched it like two more colleges at a time like every week and and um and it just kind of kept on going and uh i think a

lot of people just kind of Like wrote it off right it was this thing that you know a lot of people in colleges loved but people like okay that's kind of a kid thing it's not it's not going to be a global thing and i was like no someday someone's going to do this it's going to be a global thing but like google and microsoft and all these companies could never really get motivated to do it because there was probably a bunch of internal bureaucracy or forces that were like naysaying Against like why this is

a valuable thing so then okay then the people who are in college started graduating and they kept on using it so then it was like okay so this clearly isn't just a college thing and we started in 2007 we opened it up beyond college so that anyone can sign up and people of all different ages started signing up And then the meme shifted from this is a a college thing to this is a fad right because people you know you mention myspace and you know there's this whole string of social apps like this there's friendster

and there's myspace and it was the whole thing was there's like one after another so it's like no there's not gonna be one for like 20 years right that lasts for like for 20 years or 30 years it's like this is a fad and probably You know inside google or microsoft there were probably people who thought that this would be a cool thing to do and and and and like and and go build this but probably a bunch of bureaucracy and people like naysaying on it so we just kept on going and and then the

next meme was oh it's never going to be a good Business okay they like okay so there's a hundred million people using it they've been going for like five or six years um you know it's you know maybe it's not a fad maybe maybe people can keep on using it but like but i mean there's only one good internet ads business and it's google so it's like the chance that like someone can invent another one it's like that Seems really low so let's like i don't know just because no one really motivated so i guess

my reflection on this is that i think with so many things in the world i think we did it because we just cared more and actually believed in it so we just kept going right it shouldn't have been us like people had more resources all along the way and and cared more and i i've just found that that's actually Sort of something that i've noticed in other areas too so if you notice like if you think about like what what like elon's doing with rockets you know or like what we're trying to do with the

metaverse right it's just like these are sort of these crazy things and i do think at some level just the people who believe in them the most and are willing to spend like a decade or 15 years of their life kind of Digging in the trenches when investors are telling you that it's not a good idea um or i don't know i think i i think like kind of care is probably undervalued in terms of determining what who ends up doing what in the world um i think most people probably have an assumption of like

something that is so obviously true to you that you just Assume that other people are gonna go do it but just because it's so obvious to you doesn't actually mean that it's that obvious to other people right so i mean you probably have this around a lot of the stuff that you do like the stuff that you talk about the way you you kind of explore all these different topics on your podcast the you know the way you do comedy um but i don't know i mean i'm curious if You've had that experience where it's

like you just where you feel like those things are just like so obvious that obviously other people should get them too but then just like no one does well i think you had the advantage in the early days of being young and having a perspective that's not overly influenced by commerce and by corporations and by corporate politics like if you think about like Google tried to do it with google plus i remember i had a good friend that worked at google and it was too late then yeah it was too late yeah i was joking

around with her i'm like this is dog [ __ ] that's never going anywhere especially they didn't have an original idea i mean they they just i mean you can you can come late to something as long as you sort of have a have a unique contribution that you can bring to this right but they didn't yeah So you're trying to get people to escape leave from other social media platforms to go to this other clunky one that is just basically like a a beta version of some new you know new facebook or yeah yeah

just didn't build the same thing six years later you have to add yeah yeah it wasn't compelling but it is interesting though because it's like when when a product like yours achieves escape Velocity it gets to this point where it's just so big and it's like you have to have instagram you have to have facebook you just everybody uses it it's just one of those things and i am always fascinated to like what is that like for the person who made it and it's got to be so bizarre to see it just continue to spread

i mean it's not it's not getting smaller it just keeps getting bigger yeah which is nuts like You have three billion people it's getting bigger that's nuts well how long do you see yourself doing this how long do you see yourself running it do you think there's ever going to come a point in time where the stress is just overwhelming you like just pawn it off to somebody else and i don't i'm not sure if that'll be the reason i mean i don't know maya i think i'm probably going to do this for a while

just Because i mean i kind of viewed the phases of the company as the first phase was building facebook and i was like okay can we build a social product that's super successful and we did we basically made like the most used service in the world and then it's like okay like once you're lucky but like can can we do this multiple times right so and then that's when you know We got instagram joined us super early i think there were 16 employees at the time and i think it had 20 million people using it

or something something like super early and why did you pick up instagram what year was that 2012. it was the same year we went public but it was really small at the time super talented team kevin super talented guy who who created kevin and mike um and did a lot of awesome work work together um and then the whatsapp Folks joined and i think there were about 60 people working on whatsapps these were super early things when they joined us but and we've scaled both of those too i mean whatsapp now is you know more

than two billion people um instagram is i don't think it's quite two billion yet but it's basically um it's it's on its way Um so and then messenger we we kind of grew from scratch and that has more than a billion people too so it's like okay so now for the second phase of the company it's like went from building one one great social experience to now building four so it's like all right that's pretty good we can we can do this we can keep on evolving these things and As you say they keep on

growing and the businesses around them are good we're just empowering a lot of entrepreneurs around the world so really happy about all that stuff and there's a lot more to do um but i look at a lot of what we're doing still just in those experiences feels constrained by the fact that it's happening on a phone um and i just think phones are very limited so i think for The next chapter of what what we're going to do it's about continuing to build those but also defining what the next computing platform is going to be

which is for me what the metaverse is all about and this kind of immersive world and feeling of presence that you can have with another person and you're never going to feel a super deep sense of presence with someone on the phone but that's like the holy grail if we can Deliver that through glasses or a headset then like that's what i'm going to dedicate the next you know 10 or 15 years of of my life to but like i don't know my outlook though on what what types of things i want to focus on

i mean i'm curious how this has changed as you've grown in your career too but like for me i don't know for the first maybe like 15 years of building the company i was really just like Solely focused on like let's connect more people let's um let's grow this community to be bigger and bigger let's grow the business to be bigger and bigger and now and i obviously care about that i mean it's i want to continue seeing these things thrive but i think about my life more now in terms of projects that i want

to take on on like a decade-long basis and Um and there's some things that work right so like building out the metaverse and with vr and and ar and building out the whole developer community and creator community around that i view that as 10 maybe if it takes longer 15-year project but but that's like something that i just want to kind of dedicate myself to um done a lot of stuff on the on the Philanthropy side where i just like it's been really cool getting a chance to work with my my wife priscilla on this

had just like opened up a whole new side of our relationship where like it's like we were partners and now we also get to work together and she's brilliant and she was a doctor and um just understands so many more things about biological science than i do and you know i can bring this whole Engineering perspective and like we can we learn so much from from doing that together but basically you know our our philanthropy i mean the long-term goal is to basically create tools for the scientific community to enable them to either be able

to cure prevent or manage um all diseases within this with this century and i think that's possible i mean it's um but not within the decade but within within A century so you know for that you know we're taking on um a bunch of kind of 10-year projects to just sort of be able to observe different things about human biology working that haven't been seen before so like one example is we're working on this imaging institute an imaging project where we want to be able to be able to and you You have like microscopes today

and they can see stuff but it's like pretty hard to see things that are going on like inside your body right um you know you're blocked by the other tissue that's in the way um but now through a combination of different techniques um you can use this like cryo-em technique where you can like take certain um Tissue out of of of a person and it's still will be i mean there are techniques where the where some of the tissue will still be alive for some period of time even though it's obviously going to die because

it's been removed from you and you can look at that under under a really powerful microscope and then you can use ai techniques over time to be able to kind of extrapolate from what you've seen in very high resolution in The tissue that you've removed from the body to now being able to okay even though there's like optical and physical limits on what you can see with a microscope in a body you can use all this data that's been generated in ai to effectively be able to see different cells interacting like no one has ever

seen a synapse you know neuron like fire and like and like what it looks like in the In the synapse of a brain before like in a living organism but i i kind of think my engineering perspective on this is like how are you going to debug a system or help solve it if you can't like step through the code right like one line at a time and like see everything that's happening right if you want to you want to really understand what's going on in the brain you need to see That right um so

i mean that's the kind of project that that we're doing in on the philanthropy side so that's like that's pretty cool too right but it's like a different kind of thing so over time i i i've sort of broadened out and it's not just for the first 10 years or so the company was so all consuming that i like really Couldn't do much else and i wasn't that well rounded of a person i think having a family changes that i think it sort of forces you to to become a little more balanced but but now

i'd say there's like projects at work there's project and philanthropy there's also just personal stuff that i just really enjoy like building up our ranch to be self-sustaining and like a hundred percent Like off the grid and being able to grow all the stuff that we want there and like raise our own cattle and um i i think that that's that's like a cool fun project too right so i at this point i sort of define meaning in my life more by getting to work with people who i really like on a different set of

things and just Get to learn from doing a bunch of different things but i'm curious how that's kind of shifted in your life as you've grown in your career too i mean it's well i think what you're dealing with is you have so much success that you're comfortable enough to you for you to not think about just success and to only think about uh growing the business instead you're thinking about projects that are fascinating to you which is the ultimate Form of success right could you actually focus on the things that you're really interested in

whether it's in philanthropy or whether it's in like personal projects and hobbies or just business ideas that you you might not even think are like the most financially viable they're just fascinating to you i think that's amazing i think that that i would love to see that in more people because i think so many people just get caught up in the game of resources and Numbers and they just want to grow numbers and grow and have more money and have bigger toys and a bigger this and bigger that and it's a trap you know and

i think sometimes people are caught in that trap when they're ahead of the game they're they're winning the game they've won the game but yet they're still like sucked into it and they never really branch off and find things that are deeply fulfilling To them and so really unfortunate because that's the trap of the businessman you know the businessman gets consumed by just wealth they get consumed by success of the company eternal growth and it's a real trap um i i have a similar perspective in that i don't think about the my show in terms

of how it grows or how it does well i just uh i just do what i like to do you know and i think As much about uh archery and jujitsu and playing pool and and automobiles i think about a lot of different things i don't just think about the podcast and when i do the podcast the very fortunate thing that i have is that it's who i talk to is entirely based on whether or not someone's willing to talk to them or whether or not i'm interested and talk to them so that's all it

is there's no external Pressure so it's it never feels like a job it always like oh mark zuckerberg i'd love to talk to mark he seems like an interesting guy i don't like the way you sip water though when you're sipping water in the senate you're sipping water like a robot i mean you take a real drink i mean go ahead i mean honestly [Laughter] that's the senate testimony is not exactly an environment that is set up to Accentuate the humanity of the subject quite the opposite right um i don't know i mean if you're

you're up there for for six or seven hours you're gonna you're gonna make some face that's uh that's that's worth making a meme out of right and then they're just gonna only concentrate on that and that's gonna be the big deal but you know so I'm just fortunate that i i can do this and just and the appeal of the show i think i mean if i had to think about it i don't think about it too much honestly but if i thought about i think the appeal of the show is that i'm actually interested

in in what the guest has to say and it's because those are the people i've chosen whether it's i'm talking to a scientist or a philosopher or an athlete or you or anybody i'm interested i'm genuinely curious and if I wasn't i wouldn't do it and so because of that i think it translates to the people at home and it becomes it you know resonates with people yeah i mean there's a i was going to say paradox i'm not sure if it's a paradox but i think there's there actually is a feedback loop between those

things i would guess though right it's like you're saying that you don't care as much about the viewership or the listenership of the Show but to some degree because you're following your curiosity you probably are producing a more interesting show that more people want to watch yeah i'd bet that for me if if i were you know solely focused on just kind of just turning the crank on on the business it would probably incrementally grow but i think the the way that people deliver These discontinuous entrepreneurial results is by investing in things that other people

don't believe in yet and having conviction around things like that so i mean i'm not like i'm not focused on the metaverse primarily because i think there's some near-term business opportunity i actually think we're going to lose a lot of money for a long time on this massive breadth of things that we're working on that we talked about before but I mean i think that if if we do good work on this i think we should be positioning ourselves quite well for the future and i i do care about winning for for all of our

employees and our shareholders and stuff like that too i mean that obviously matters because we have all these awesome people who are actually doing the work yeah i mean it's it's a brilliant gamble but it's all also a very well-informed gamble like What you're doing is and you're not just gambling you're innovating so it's it's it's a really cool place to be but what you're saying and what you're talking about is authentic focus and interest and i think today in this world where there's so much [ __ ] it's so hard to know what's real

and what's not real people value in authentic they value authenticity rather they value it in in A really unique way and when someone can create a service or a social media platform or something where like people really believe that the people behind it are trying to make it the best thing possible and they're not just trying to grow it you know forever and make it constantly get bigger and make more money and they're yeah they're also genuinely trying to innovate and they're genuinely trying to Expand into this new realm of the metaverse and they're genuinely

trying to moderate content in a thoughtful way that resonates with people it's very important that's probably one of the reasons why it's so big and i think that i think that applies to many many many things but i think people are often times very short-sighted and they're only thinking about growth they're thinking about Constant never-ending growth and they're not necessarily thinking about why am i doing this in the first place what if i didn't have to do this anymore what if i had so much money that i could do whatever i wanted would i still

do this and why would i do and how would i do it differently how would i do it differently if i wasn't thinking about just money i was thinking in terms of like big picture things and making it more enjoyable making it more thrilling To me making it more exciting you know and i think that we're very fortunate you and i in that we have the ability to take those kind of choices and i think that kind of freedom is probably one of the most important freedoms for the western person that's listening to this like

that is not confined in a communist country i mean there's obviously a lot bigger problems that they have but like you're in a you're in a position where You can make your own choices like what what would be the best choice to make well the best choice to make is to actually follow your interests like what is actually fascinating to you and for you the fact that you're really interested in like health and philanthropy and in those things as well as also interested in the metaverse and interested in ar and and vr and all these

different modalities all these Different ways to express it and and how enriching it is to people's lives it's [ __ ] cool just trying why you're succeeding man i mean you're it's obvious it's pretty dope and uh i think we're like three hours in so we could wrap it up here all right um thank you for coming it was really cool to meet you and uh i appreciate all the things you're doing what you're saying and i'm so glad you're into martial arts Now too it's great awesome yeah i know it's great to get a

chance to to do this yeah let's do it again sometime man let's do it when whenever you have some new crazy [ __ ] coming out and whenever take things to a new next level all right come on in we'll talk do it all right thank you thank you all right bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you