Aug. 25, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:53:38
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| So, your new Oculus is awesome. | ||
| It's very impressive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very cool. | ||
| Coming out in October, we're going to be talking about it at our Connect conference that's coming up. | ||
| Yeah, pretty excited about it. | ||
| It's so interesting. | ||
| 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, it's tracking my eyes. | ||
| When I make an angry face, it makes an angry face. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| 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 kind of a creepy way. | ||
| But it's very cool. | ||
| Yeah, so for me this stuff is all about helping people connect. | ||
| The way that I got into this is... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just started thinking about what is the... | ||
| What would be the ultimate expression of basically people using technology to feel present with each other? | ||
| It's not phones. | ||
| It's not computers. | ||
| How do you get this 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 device that's coming out in October, there are a few big features. | ||
| I mean, the one that you're talking about, basically social presence. | ||
| I mean, the ability to now have kind of eye contact in virtual reality. | ||
| Have your face be tracked so that way... | ||
| Your avatar, it's not just like this still thing, 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, that's like a, you know, there's more nonverbal communication when people are with each other than verbal communication. | ||
| You had a really good point, too, about face tracking. | ||
| If you're doing 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 looking up. | ||
| And if you look down at the actual screen, 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 first time really to do that. | ||
| You know, I mean, when we're using technology today, I mean, 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? | ||
| I mean, you get some signals, some information, you can see their face. | ||
| But 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 kind of like a deep level that you're not actually there with them. | ||
| You're just getting some information about what they look like. | ||
| And to me, what virtual reality unlocks is it basically really convinces your brain that you're there. | ||
| And when you're in there, you're... | ||
| You have to basically try to convince your brain that this isn't real, right? | ||
| And that you're not present. | ||
| And there are all these just subtle signals and things that either deepen the illusion or break it. | ||
| That each time we do a new version, we just try to... | ||
| 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 a headset and be able to look around. | ||
| And for that, one of the key things that your eye basically refreshes... | ||
| 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 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 what you were looking at didn't match as you were rotating your head. | ||
| So that was kind of the first thing. | ||
| Then we got hands. | ||
| And there was this whole thing that was super interesting there where at first we wanted to, you know, display your whole arm, which makes sense, right? | ||
| Because, I mean, you'd think, okay, it's a little weird to just see your hand. | ||
| But it turns out that your brain is perfectly willing to just accept seeing your hand without your arm. | ||
| Because your hand is the thing that it's trying to manipulate. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, if we kind of interpolated and got your arm position wrong, right? | ||
| So we'd get into these cases where your hands were here, and we'd sort of guess that your arm was like that or something. | ||
| And if your arm was actually like that, but we displayed it so that it was in like that, you're like, ah, my elbow's broken! | ||
| It felt really wrong. | ||
| 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 kind of eye contact was all just AI simulated, but we didn't actually know when you were making eye contact because we weren't tracking the eyes. | ||
| And now for this version and hopefully a lot of the different ones that we build going forward, you'll be able to have realistic facial expressions and more translated directly to your avatar. | ||
| But there's this whole roadmap of basically how do you deliver this 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, it did that, it made the O face. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| And you know, you were saying also that the way this is tracking is 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 where you have like a haptic feedback suit? | ||
| And you have to zip this thing up to get into a game and in that way you're gonna be fully immersive or do you think that I can get to the point where it can mimic the movements of your body accurately without you having to wear something? | ||
| So 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. | ||
| 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 have a whole lot of different devices. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There are going to be times when you want to kind of have that I think it's a 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, whether it's on an airplane or you're doing work at the office or you're going to a coffee shop or whatever. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right now, there's kind of two... | ||
| The concepts of virtual reality and augmented reality are sort of on two different development paths, but they're obviously fundamentally interrelated. | ||
| So virtual reality, it's kind of possible to build today. | ||
| Quest 2, it's pretty popular, doing well. | ||
| Hopefully the new one that comes out, I think it's a pretty big step above it. | ||
| But 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 in displays that came from TVs and then laptops and phones. | ||
| And some of the display technology gets to piggyback on those decades of innovation and all these different companies that have done that work before. | ||
| AR is a pretty different beast because 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... | ||
| I mean, it won't be like a wireframe because you'll need to fit some electronics in it, where 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 we and a lot of other folks think are going to be this technology called waveguides, which is completely different from screens. | ||
| Because a screen, it's like you're looking at a thing, and basically you're looking at all the pixels that are on the screen. | ||
| The thing 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 and be able to place them at different depths in the world. | ||
| So is a waveguide a type of technology? | ||
| What is a waveguide? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Basically, they can be made of different substances, plastic, glass, different substrates. | ||
| 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 these waveguides that have the right properties. | ||
| Because you want, for augmented reality, to get something that's a 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. | ||
| So it's not only just is it kind of working as a hologram, but there's all these different dimensions beyond just being, like, a better video chat. | ||
| If we wanted 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... | ||
| It could 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 some of your friends are there physically and some of them are there as holograms. | ||
| It's actually kind of wild. | ||
| One of the thought experiments that I like to do is thinking about how few of the things that we physically have in the world actually need to be physical. | ||
| Obviously, things like chairs need to be physical, where you're not going to 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 an app. | ||
| We'll just have an app there on your wall, and it's like, snap your fingers. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Get the hologram there for the TV and we can have our glasses and watch whatever you want there. | ||
| I don't know, they're sort of limited to being rectangular now because a bunch of limits in terms of the physics of how they get produced, but in the future you'll just have some high school students or college students developing apps and they'll just be wild. | ||
| Crazy stuff will just kind of get created. | ||
| So you'll eventually be able to kind of have that all come through these AR glasses. | ||
| So are there these AR glasses, are they in production now? | ||
| Are they in development now? | ||
| Like 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 glasses, do they exist already? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think we'll start to get stuff that kind of looks like the full version of this over the next... | ||
| I'd say... | ||
| Three to five years. | ||
| But I think it'll also start off pretty expensive once it's available, and then it'll take a while to work down to something that's like hundreds of dollars. | ||
| There are versions of this that you can start to see if you relax some of the constraints, right? | ||
| So the kind of ultimate AR experience is that like, okay, you just have normal looking glasses that can kind of have all of these, have holograms, make it so you can interact with people wherever you want. | ||
| But... | ||
| If you relax the form factor constraint, so you have a headset 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 in VR. So we got to play around with this a little bit in the sword fighting experience that we did. | ||
| Basically, the thing about mixed reality is you see the physical world around you. | ||
| 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 in both eyes, so that way you can—because otherwise it's weird and we kind of see stuff and— You know, 3D because our two eyes see slightly different things. | ||
| The computers are putting that together on the fly. | ||
| And then you can overlay digital objects on top of that. | ||
| So when we were 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 direction that I think that the industry is exploring. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| The other is basically looking at, okay, so we've 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? | ||
| So you kind of go from both sides. | ||
| 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 smart glasses side, we work with Ray-Ban to basically build these smart glasses. | ||
| And they're the best-selling smart glasses that have ever been built. | ||
| We're continuing to work on new versions of it, but basically you can get a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers now that have a microphone and they have a speaker and they can take photos and take videos and you can post them to Instagram. | ||
| They do it on voice command? | ||
| Yep, yeah. | ||
| Oh, so you can say take a photo of this? | ||
| Yep, take a photo, take a video. | ||
| And what kind of image quality are you getting off of these things? | ||
| It's pretty good. | ||
| I want to make sure I don't get the spec wrong and I just have all these different numbers in my head because I want to make sure I don't confuse it with the new version. | ||
| Is it like similar to like a selfie camera? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Limited in comparison to the back camera? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's not quite as good as the back cameras today. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| No, it's like... | ||
| I mean you look at the quality and it's good. | ||
| 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 I think is actually a really important part of this. | ||
| Could you put a piece of tape over the light? | ||
| I mean, I guess in theory, but it's... | ||
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unidentified
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If you were a creep. | |
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that little thing in the corner, is that a highlight or a light? | ||
| No, that's the light. | ||
| And it blinks and it's a pretty active indicator. | ||
| And I think if you put a piece of tape over it, it would probably interfere with the camera. | ||
| And so those Wayfarers are essentially the same size as normal Wayfarers? | ||
| Do they have thicker arms? | ||
| I think it's ever so slightly thicker, but it's within the same ballpark of weight. | ||
| So we worked with a company that, Ray-Bans, these are some of the most popular and successful glasses, and part of the reason why I wanted to work with them is because they know a lot about glasses design, and that's not my thing. | ||
| So I figure, okay, they'll really bring to the table some constraints around like, okay, 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 super sharp. | ||
| They're this great Italian company. | ||
| And the collaboration has been awesome so far. | ||
| So I'm looking forward to building more stuff with them. | ||
| But yeah, so you basically have these two paths to the technology at once. | ||
| 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 kind of pumping more technology into what's the, like, what can you fit into 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 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 doing quite well. | ||
| I mean, I don't think we've released exact numbers on the sales, but it's within the ballpark of Xbox or PlayStation or those kind of platforms. | ||
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unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, so I mean, we started off, this was sort of my theory on this is like, all right, gaming is use case number one for VR. But then pretty quickly, if you look at any platform, right, so computers, phones before, games are a huge part of those platforms. | ||
| But 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 communicate. | ||
| And you know, that's kind of how we get meaning in our life is interacting with other people. | ||
| So I was 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. | ||
| 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 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, 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 AR are really designed to be able to move around and do things and interact with the world, and that's really important to me. | ||
| I hate sitting in front of a desk. | ||
| I just feel like if I'm not active, I'm wasting my day. | ||
| So, I don't know, there have been these awesome experiences. | ||
| Basically, a couple of companies, you can kind of think about it like Peloton for VR, where it's like Peloton, they sell you the bike or the treadmill, and then you buy the subscription and you get the classes. | ||
| There's a couple of companies that basically 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 these companies, and you can just take lessons and do different things and fitness. | ||
| I thought that was pretty wild. | ||
| I thought that in the long term, something like that would start to happen. | ||
| But it happened way sooner than I thought, which was really cool to see. | ||
| Well, if you do one of the boxing games, you realize right away, this is a really good workout. | ||
| 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, you really wind up getting a really high heart rate. | ||
| You put out a lot of energy. | ||
| It's really good cardio. | ||
| I found my feet would hurt. | ||
| Because I was pivoting and moving so much, because I was constantly switching stances and trying to get away from punches. | ||
| And as you get further on in some of the games, the opponents become more difficult. | ||
| 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 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? | ||
| They're just fun. | ||
| Yeah, it's just that they just happen to be physical. | ||
| Are they capable of having two people, like, 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 was 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 fencing demo, our internal team built, because we haven't released the new device yet, so in order to kind of make stuff work, we kind of build that ourselves. | ||
| But the boxing ones are made all by other game developers and different developers. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All the ones that I've played, I mean, I do Thrill the Fight, and I really like Creed. | ||
| But I do those as... | ||
| As single player. | ||
| 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're talking about martial arts, like, in terms of, like, Muay Thai and other... | ||
| I think Jiu-Jitsu would be a real problem. | ||
| But, you know, 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's pretty good for that. | ||
| Like it's probably like the best combat sport for VR because you don't even have to hit anything to feel like you kind of are. | ||
| And when you get hit with a jab, your screen lights up like you feel like you got hit. | ||
| Yeah, I mean for kicking, with punching it's a little easier to throw a punch and then just pull it back. | ||
| With kicking, if you're not hitting a pad or something, you want to like continue rotating or else it's tough to really put your weight into it. | ||
| Do you envision a world where one day the physical experience of the game is going to be inconsequential because everything is 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, some thing that's not there. | ||
| I mean, is that ultimately where all this is going? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just think that so much of our experience is our body and not just our mind. | ||
| I mean, there's this strain of kind of philosophical thought that's like, okay, what is a human? | ||
| It's really just your brain, right? | ||
| And I don't subscribe to that at all because, I mean, I don't know how you feel about stuff, but 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 so physical. | ||
| 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 in tanks or just brains in a body. | ||
| I think our physical being and the actions that we take there are just as much of the experience of being human. | ||
| I would agree to 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've 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, and we talked about 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 have a very realistic 3D representation of those places. | ||
| You took me to Rome today. | ||
| I got to see Rome. | ||
| It's very cool. | ||
| But do you think that ultimately that is going to get to a time where the technology is so advanced that it's indiscernible? | ||
| That you could have a podcast experience with me. | ||
| You and I could have this same conversation right now, but neither one of us be in this room. | ||
| Yeah, I think the nature of technology is that... | ||
| 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 mimicable or replaceable than others. | ||
| So we were talking before about, okay, boxing, yeah, you can do that pretty well. | ||
| Maybe one day we'll get Muay Thai and kicking in. | ||
| Jiu-jitsu, that's going to be pretty hard, right? | ||
| Because you need, like, all kinds of resistance. | ||
| So... | ||
| I mean, I think the way that this progresses is like, 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. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I also, I mean, maybe just because I'm in the position of, like, Working on building this stuff every day. | ||
| I'm just trying to make it useful for a lot of things. | ||
| To jump to it's so useful that it's better than everything. | ||
| That's so far ahead of where we actually are because I'm in the trenches every day trying to get this to work. | ||
| Maybe too close to it. | ||
| But from a bird's eye view, if you looked at where this is going, it's going to become more immersive. | ||
| 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 human race could survive another 100,000 years, the odds we wouldn't create a really realistic simulation is probably pretty low. | ||
| Yeah, I think the question is just how realistic and how good. | ||
| To me, the holy grail is building something that can create a sense of human presence. | ||
| I've spent the last almost 20 years of my life building social software, Making it so that whatever limited computation you have, you can kind of share something about your experience. | ||
| It started off with primarily text when I was in college. | ||
| Then we all got these smartphones, they had cameras, and 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 immersive experience is clearly going to be the next step. | ||
| But there's this question about... | ||
| 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 social and entertainment. | ||
| There's professional. | ||
| I follow this economist who basically studies that economic opportunity and upward mobility is sort of limited or varies based on what zip code you grow up in. | ||
| Because there's different opportunities in different places. | ||
| Imagine if you didn't have to 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, I think that's going to be pretty sweet. | ||
| It'll unlock a lot of economic opportunity for a lot of people. | ||
| Is it ever going to be 100% as good as being there in person? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But, like, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| When we were talking about doing this conversation, 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 whatever amount of simulation you have is... | ||
| You can create a lot of value even if it's not 100% as good as the actual physical thing. | ||
| So I just view our job as we'll basically approach that like an asymptote. | ||
| I don't know if you'll never be able to do all of the things that you can do in person with a person. | ||
| We'll just be able to do more and more. | ||
| If today it's gaming or hanging out, over the next few years it'll be working. | ||
| So hopefully you'll just be able to teleport in and basically just show up as a hologram and work remotely and live wherever you want, be with your family wherever they live, but just be able to show up in whatever place. | ||
| I think that that's going to be pretty awesome and I think we'll be able to do that pretty well. | ||
| It's going to be a real issue for commercial real estate. | ||
| There's not going to be a lot of offices. | ||
| If that actually becomes as good as having a cell phone in your pocket and being able to make a phone call, 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. | ||
| Maybe they'll 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, 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 in my house now than I would have before. | ||
| But Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I do think that seeing people in person having that sense of presence makes a big difference. | ||
| I think so too, but there's definitely a big pushback now about people going to the office rather than working from home. | ||
| People would rather just do their work from home and they're like, with the internet connections as they are today and the ability to videoconference, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I have this thing where I'll be in zone, kind of flow concentration, working on something, and my wife will ask me some basic question, and I'll just be like, oh, man. | ||
| I just lost my flow, and it's like... | ||
| And from her perspective, it's like, oh, not a big deal. | ||
| That was a quick question. | ||
| Just go back to what you were doing. | ||
| It's like, no, that's not how it works. | ||
| So I do think, to some degree, having people be able to work remotely is actually pretty useful for a lot of things. | ||
| But I think we'll need to find this mix. | ||
| I physically run away from my wife when I have a joke idea. | ||
| If she's talking and I have an idea, I'll just run away. | ||
| I just go, I got an idea. | ||
| 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 some ways, well, you would have to have a real quiet and secure place, but I think for a lot of people, just the wasted time commuting and all that, if you could eliminate that through AR or VR, some sort of a hologram 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 COVID, and just kind of rethinking the way that stuff... | ||
| I think reducing the commute has been one of the big efficiencies. | ||
| But also being able to live in different places has been nice. | ||
| I spent a lot of time down in Kauai earlier on, and I got really into surfing and hydrofoiling. | ||
| I just 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 Palo Alto. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I'm pretty positive on all this. | ||
| I think if you can give people the ability to get their kind of fluid state, like flow state work 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 that's pretty valuable. | ||
| Now, that doesn't replace everything, right? | ||
| 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, you know, yeah, there's a downside to being so efficient about being able to teleport in and out, too, because you can kind of miss some of those casual downtime moments. | ||
| But overall, yeah, I mean, I think it's going to create this kind of crazy amount of efficiency there. | ||
| Yeah, I think people are still going to crave real-world experiences no matter what. | ||
| Obviously, I do stand-up comedy, so obviously that experience, you must be there. | ||
| That's part of the fun, is being in the room with people. | ||
| But 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, and you would probably get pretty close. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm like, don't do that. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| You need the feedback. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| It's super awkward just doing public speaking and not having any feedback. | ||
| Well, if someone's just doing public feedback, there's some really great podcasts where people, 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. | ||
| Comedy by itself with no audience is not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So 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 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 the stories that I've heard of people using VR that I think is really touching. | ||
| So there's this woman who basically lost her son and 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 had a little bit more anonymity because 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 a real important thing. | ||
| Experience for her 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 you kind of got a bunch of the way there by feeling like you were present with people there. | ||
| My friend Brian Redband, he does this thing called Virtual Redband. | ||
| What does he do? | ||
| They go to diners and stuff like that. | ||
| They set it up. | ||
| VRChat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he does it in Oculus, and he has a bunch of his friends log on at the same time, and they go into a room together and hang out. | ||
| It's really interesting, because I think that... | ||
| To be able to have an online community where you go to a place and you all meet up and you're all talking and hearing each other's voices and seeing the avatar moving, like that alien avatar that you showed me today, it's very real looking. | ||
| I mean, I clearly see that it's this animated thing, but I would liken it to an avatar, like from the movie Avatar, like the Na'vi. | ||
| There's something cool about it where it's definitely a step above a lot of these things that I've seen in the past. | ||
| That's moving into this much more realistic sort of place 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 this diner and hang out with these guys as a penguin. | ||
| And 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... | ||
| where you can actually see the person's face. | ||
| Because the way that our memory works, it's very spatial. | ||
| So when I leave here today, I'll remember that you were across from me, and there's a symmetry. | ||
| It's like you're across from me, so that means I'm across from you. | ||
| We have a shared memory of kind of the space of the place. | ||
| And if I – well, I guess it doesn't quite work because of the headphones – But normally, you know, if you talk, it's coming from that direction. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And also, there's no symmetry, right? | ||
| So if you're in the top left 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 meeting someone said something in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whereas then, you know, say 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 kind of a whole separate tangent that we can go down. | ||
| I think you'll clearly want the ability to do both, have a photorealistic one and an expressive one. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, if you're sitting around and someone's a penguin or your friends are clearly cartoony, but you're sitting around a table and you have a shared sense of space and 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 thing, which it's just kind of getting all those details right over time. | ||
| I just think that there's... | ||
| I mean, this to me, this is some of the most exciting work that I've gotten to do in a while because I just feel like building social experiences on phones is so constrained. | ||
| In some ways, it's awesome because there's billions of people that have phones. | ||
| So we can build services that get used by billions of people around the world, and that's obviously rewarding in its own way, too. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| These things, phones, computers, they were not designed for basically communication and interaction. | ||
| They were designed for work and certain computational workloads. | ||
| So a lot of what I'm trying to do is like, okay, well, Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 on apps. | ||
| You'd build it where the fundamental unit of how you interact is around kind of people and how you express yourself. | ||
| And you'd want to be able to 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. | ||
| It's pretty wild to try to build this all from the ground up because it's just this incredible breadth and amount of technology. | ||
| I often get criticized because we're investing just this huge amount in this. | ||
| We're going to spend this year alone more than $10 billion on all of these different research streams. | ||
| But the breadth of this is just like extremely wide. | ||
| 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 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 research going towards the full AR. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| All of a sudden, we're going to call this meeting together and we're going to be on the moon. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I love the fact that there's people like you out there doing it. | ||
| It's expanding the possibilities for this stuff. | ||
| Neural interfaces. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| Where is that going? | ||
| And where are we at right now? | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's 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 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 some people, I mean, like like Elon with Neuralink and 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. | ||
| I mean, there will probably be interesting use cases I don't want to be an early adopter. | ||
| Yeah, I think you want the mature version of that, not the one where it's going to get a lot better next year and you need to get your brain implant upgraded every year. | ||
| But here's the kind of version of this that I spend a lot of time thinking about. | ||
| So you have AR glasses, right? | ||
| And how are you going to control them? | ||
| How you kind of control any computation devices is obviously super fundamental to what the platform is. | ||
| So you have a bunch of different modes. | ||
| One of them is going to be voice. | ||
| You'll be able to talk to it. | ||
| But that doesn't always work. | ||
| If you're in a public place or you want to be discreet or you want to just not annoy the people around you, you're not going to want to dictate everything out loud. | ||
| A second way is going to be using your hands. | ||
| So let's say, okay, I snap my fingers. | ||
| We have a chess game or a poker game. | ||
| And okay, here's our chess board and 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 going to be walking down the sidewalk, like, manipulating stuff with your hands. | ||
| Minority reports. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think at some basic level, if you can get past that just being weird, I think most people's hands will just get tired. | ||
| If you hold your hands out like this for a long enough period of time, eventually you want to put your hands down. | ||
| So the question is, how do you make it so that you can basically go and have your mind give commands to the computer, in this case the glasses, without having to speak out loud, without having to wave your hands around? without having to speak out loud, without having to wave Even though those things will be great for some use cases, you're not going to want them all the time. | ||
| So the research that we're doing... | ||
| It's based on the—it's basically it's input only and it's focused on—so 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 path that we have is it's based on the fact that we have all these extra motor neurons in our body, right? | ||
| And part of the reason for that is, like, in case you get hurt, you have neuroplasticity, you can rewire, do stuff— Find a different pathway 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 individually. | ||
| We kind of reinforce certain pathways and end up using one kind of motor neuron pathway 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, tell your hand to move in like a pattern that it isn't used to, and then 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, 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? | ||
| So you just kind of, like, I don't know, twitch your wrist a little bit, maybe like this, like some super discreet motion 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 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, especially earlier in COVID, one thing that I think actually was quite good or is quite good is the ability to both kind of 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 you don't want to say something in front of someone. | ||
| I have this issue a lot because there's a lot of confidential information that I have around the company. | ||
| I don't want to share it with everyone, but I want to get certain people's opinion on stuff. | ||
| And if I'm doing a meeting and it's purely physical and everyone is there, I found that sometimes I have to wait until the meeting is over to go get the answer to the question that I wanted. | ||
| If I'm kind of having a virtual meeting over Zoom or in VR and workrooms, you can just kind of text people while you're doing that. | ||
| I actually think that it will unlock a massive amount of efficiency in communication and expression between people to make it so that people don't have to wait until they're done doing one thing to send a message to someone else. | ||
| But yeah, I do think that there's a separate question. | ||
| About if you have glasses and you're kind of going about... | ||
| It's one thing to have VR and you put it on when you want to go play a game or do a meeting. | ||
| In the kind of fullness of augmented reality, when you kind of have the glasses and you're, like, going about that 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, that's going to be a really important AI problem, too, I think, to be able to kind of simulate and understand... | ||
| I don't think it's going to be as black and white as do not disturb on or off. | ||
| I think you want some intelligence there about routing and understanding which things you're going to want to get and which things 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. | ||
| 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 absorbed in social media and these kind of things that these kids do. | ||
| But I think it's a part of life. | ||
| And I think 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, 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 information on the amount of calories that are, if you pick up a food item, like what is that? | ||
| Oh, 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 sort of 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 going to 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 think about – like, it's like I want to have this experience in the real world. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's all this additional information that we bring to the physical experiences that we have that... | ||
| Whether it's digital 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. | ||
| 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 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 you can change them really easily. | ||
| But 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, I think it's probably gonna 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 have kind of people be able to pop in and interact with them through it. | ||
| I think that's going to be powerful. | ||
| We'll obviously need to get the balance on this right, but that's sort of how I think about it. | ||
| I think probably the right way to think about what the real world is at this point is not actually just the physical world. | ||
| But the physical world, I'm probably more optimistic or believe that the physical world is probably more important to our being and essence and soul than a lot of other people in the industry. | ||
| So I really care about getting that balance right. | ||
| I think the balance is important, but I think you're correct. | ||
| I think there is 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 there always. | ||
| How many people are on... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And my kids, I haven't had to think about it quite as much yet because they're pretty young. | ||
| Six and five, right? | ||
| Loggi just turned five this weekend. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| So, I mean, they use... | ||
| I actually... | ||
| I want them to use technology for different things. | ||
| I mean, I teach them how to code. | ||
| I think it's like an outlet for creativity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Augie especially. | ||
| Max likes building things. | ||
| Augie thinks about it as art. | ||
| So every night I try to do bedtime with them religiously. | ||
| So I try to end my meetings in order to be able to put them down. | ||
| And I ask them what activity they want to do. | ||
| Do you want to read or do you want to wrestle? | ||
| And Augie's just like, I want to do code art. | ||
| It's like, oh. | ||
| That's such an interesting way to think about it. | ||
| I always think about coding as like you're building something, and she just thinks about it as making the computer make art. | ||
| So, anyway, 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 building a relationship, then that is associated typically with a lot of long-term benefits and well-being, right? | ||
| Because, I mean, the relationships that we have in our lives, I view that as, like, the meaning, right? | ||
| That, to me, is, like, the point. | ||
| And that, I think, over time is what generally creates happiness for people and prosperity. | ||
| But... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| I just want to make it so that the experiences that we're having aren't just these passive things. | ||
| From my perspective, there's this People spend a lot of time with screens today. | ||
| It's basically computers, phones, and TVs. | ||
| And I'm always amazed, because I spend all my time on phones and computers, that for Americans, still almost half the time that they spend on screens is TVs, more than phones or computers. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yes. | ||
| I think it might have just tipped in the last few years to being more phones and computers than TV, but TV is huge. | ||
| Because I know Netflix and YouTube, I think a giant amount of their stuff is on phones. | ||
| Yeah, it's a lot on phones, but it's a lot on TVs too, and a lot of people are still just watching cable or different things like that. | ||
| When you think about new experiences, I actually think the first thing that they're going to go do is eat TV, right? | ||
| And kind of the more passive things. | ||
| So when people talk about being worried about 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. | ||
| If it's coming from exercise, I wouldn't be that happy with that. | ||
| If it's coming from TV, I'm pretty fine with that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And there's just a ton of TV time to eat, right? | ||
| So 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 good. | ||
| And my goal 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 beta state consuming stuff. | ||
| And I think that that's like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So you asked me, how do I control my own social media time or my time on this stuff? | ||
| I do a bunch of social media. | ||
| I do a lot of messaging. | ||
| I really don't watch that much TV. And that's because I just don't have that much... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It puts me in this really weird mental state. | ||
| Unless there's something that I'm just like... | ||
| Really attached to. | ||
| And I really like watching UFC, for example, but that's because I also like doing the sport. | ||
| So it's like I have some kind of connection to it. | ||
| But, I don't know, just sitting around watching... | ||
| I don't usually get into a lot of TV shows or stuff. | ||
| Have you always been a very physical person? | ||
| Because I follow you on Instagram. | ||
| I see wakeboarding and stuff. | ||
| You're very active, which I think is a great message, too. | ||
| It's great for you, but it's also a great message for other people that here's this guy who's incredibly busy 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. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Well, I mean, and a lot of other stuff. | ||
| No, but I mean, you don't have any debate. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| This is the rule. | ||
| So... | ||
| It's like, that's just what you're going to do. | ||
| So, and I'm super grateful for it. | ||
| I mean, 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 were like, this is important. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And my sort of day is like, it's like, all right, you wake up in the morning. | ||
| Look at my phone. | ||
| You get like a million messages of stuff that come in. | ||
| It's usually not good. | ||
| People reserve the good stuff to tell me in person. | ||
| But it's like, okay, what's going on in the world that I need to pay attention to that day? | ||
| 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, fuck. | ||
| 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 basically I go, I, like, I read, I take in all the information, 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 – I used to run a lot. | ||
| But the problem with running is you can think a lot while you're running. | ||
| So I've... | ||
| Especially over the last couple of years, I've gotten really into things that require full focus. | ||
| So, you know, at the beginning of COVID, I mentioned that I spent a bunch of time in Kauai. | ||
| Our family 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 pay attention the whole time, right, or else you're going to fall and maybe get held under. | ||
| And it's, like, not... | ||
| That's not a great experience. | ||
| I don't know if you surf. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| But I tried foiling, and now I'm an oaf. | ||
| I couldn't get on the thing. | ||
| 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 couldn't figure it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, um, you're talking about the eFoil for that. | ||
| Yeah, that, it's, I bet if you tried it for, like, a few days, you'd get it down 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 e-foil. | ||
| I mean, the e-foil weighs like 40 pounds. | ||
| An actual foil board maybe weighs like 5 to 10 pounds. | ||
| So after you learn how to foil, flying an e-foil is like, it feels like you're flying a tank through the air or something. | ||
| But it's a pretty interesting learning curve, but it requires full engagement the whole time. | ||
| And then, I mean, that's sort of... | ||
| So it's cleansing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And this is sort of how I got into MMA too. | ||
| 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, alright, there's not as much foiling in Palo Alto. | ||
| So it's like, alright, 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 the perfect thing, because if you stop paying attention for one second, you're going to end up on the bottom. | ||
| So I've just found that that is... | ||
| Just really important for me in terms of what I do and being able to just kind of maintain my energy level, maintain my focus. | ||
| Because then after an hour or two of working out or rolling or wrestling with friends or training with different folks, it's like, now I'm ready to go solve whatever problem at work for the day. | ||
| And I've fully processed all the different news for the day that's come in. | ||
| And we're just ready to go. | ||
| How did you get introduced to martial arts training? | ||
| Like, how long ago was this? | ||
| It was in the last 12 months, actually. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because it was basically, I kind of, I used to just run a lot and just do that. | ||
| And then it was, and then basically, since COVID, it's like, got super into surfing and foiling, then got really into MMA. So how did you, how did you initially approach it? | ||
| Like, how did you get a trainer? | ||
| Like, what did you do? | ||
| I know a bunch of people who are into it. | ||
| There's actually this really interesting connection between people who surf and do jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| A lot of similarities. | ||
| So a bunch of the guys who I do that with, they kind of have gyms and kawaii. | ||
| You know, basically collected a bunch of recommendations, ran them by a bunch of people who I know, and I ended up... | ||
| I mean, I trained with this guy Dave Camarillo. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know Dave. | |
| Yeah, in Gorilla Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| And he's awesome. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| Yeah, super nice guy, and I feel like I'm learning a ton. | ||
| And the crazy thing is, like, I've... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It really is the best sport. | ||
| The question isn't how did I get into it, it's how did I not know about it until just now. | ||
| From the very first session that I did... | ||
| Five minutes in, I was like, where has this been my whole life? | ||
| It's like, alright, my mom made me do three varsity sports, and my life took a wrong turn when I chose to do fencing competitively instead of wrestling in high school or something. | ||
| It's like there's something that's just so primal. | ||
| About it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| 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 wrestle together. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's a certain intensity to it that I like. | ||
| It's sort of... | ||
| Maybe it's like there's this cultural thing where maybe a lot of people haven't considered it, but I've had 100% hit rate of introducing friends to it and converting them to people who now train. | ||
| Every single person who I've kind of shown it to is like, this is amazing. | ||
| This is 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 problem solving, which is the more fascinating part, like learning the techniques and focusing on memorizing the techniques and developing the skills. | ||
| And then drilling. | ||
| That's probably one of the most important things about jujitsu that people don't do enough of is drilling. | ||
| I made some of my biggest leaps in martial arts from 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 progress much quicker. | ||
| And then I noticed when I stopped doing that later, my progress kind of stagnated. | ||
| It's like there's a real clear correlation between the amount of energy you put into drilling and observing the technique and then just going through the motion with someone offering 20%, 30% resistance. | ||
| It's just not as fun. | ||
| Sparring is the most fun. | ||
| You immediately want to just slap hands and start rolling. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I really trust Dave, and I think it's also... | ||
| Dave's great. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm also just depending on what's going on in my life and work that day. | ||
| Some days I have the energy to go spar, and some days it's good to just go drill. | ||
| It's like, all right, there's a lot going on. | ||
| There's... | ||
| It's better to just go do something like 20 times in a row. | ||
| Both things are important. | ||
| But if you can force yourself to drill more than you spar, you'll get better. | ||
| It's really important. | ||
| It's like the most important thing. | ||
| And it's the thing that people do the least of. | ||
| Because to really 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 gets driven into your programming so that in the flow of an actual rolling session, it just happens. | ||
| You see Tom Hardy just won a bunch of fucking matches. | ||
| 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 in a couple years. | ||
|
unidentified
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You should do it. | |
| Bourdain did it. | ||
| He did it when he was like, God, I think he was like 60. I do a lot of stuff like this with friends, but I also just find wrestling around with friends is just... | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, wrestling is fun. | ||
| Jiu-jitsu is even more fun because it's like wrestling with like finishes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm excited that you're into it. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| And I think, you know, it really enhances your enjoyment of watching it on television because 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 jujitsu, MMA, it's, like... | ||
| I think it sort of teaches you about like the flow and momentum of things. | ||
| And I think businesses like this in a similar way where it's like the hardest thing is knowing when you're in a position where you need to push through versus sort of developing the intuition for when like, all right, when... | ||
| The momentum is just going in the other direction. | ||
| It's like, all right, you're not going to be able to pump over this swell. | ||
| If you keep your weight in this direction, you're going to get swept. | ||
| I do think it's a super concrete thing. | ||
| I think one of the things that's sort of frustrating running a company is the feedback loops are so long. | ||
| It's like, all right, so I showed you 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 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 principles, okay, what big features are we going to prioritize? | ||
| 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 sort of it's difficult in running an enterprise 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. | ||
| Am I going to be able to go turn that direction on that wave, or am I just going to get swallowed? | ||
| I think that having that mix in your life feels really important and healthy to me. | ||
| I try to get my friends into it. | ||
| My kids do jujitsu, too. | ||
| I just think it's really important that they develop all these skills and appreciation for doing physical things, just like my parents taught me. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a big part of who I am, I think. | ||
| Going back to the other conversation about, are we just brains and tanks? | ||
| It's like, no, because this is the part of my life that I think is super fun. | ||
| The building things, that's super engaging, too. | ||
| It's a very different type 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 is probably really good to sort of clean the pipes out and just clear your mind and have your ability to focus on things sort of put into perspective. | ||
| It's got to be very unmanaged. | ||
| I've talked to people about this before. | ||
| Whenever people talk about social media sites and they're doing this and they're doing that, I'm like, could you imagine trying to manage at scale 5 billion people? | ||
| Or whatever it is. | ||
| How many people are on Facebook right now? | ||
| Facebook is almost three billion, but across our different properties, it's like a little more than three and a half billion. | ||
| That's so many people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's impossible. | ||
| Like no one can manage five billion people or three billion people or a billion. | ||
| It's like the numbers are just, they're so absurd. | ||
| It's so preposterous. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| So I would imagine that for your mind, the amount of pressure that's involved in just maintaining, it has to be looming over you at all times in the background. | ||
| It's probably very difficult for you to find things that filter that out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's always stuff to work on. | ||
| So I think a big part of trying to push forward is maintaining enough control of my time to push on the things that I believe need to be advanced for the future rather than being reactive. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Which, by the way, I mean, I think that 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... | ||
| Carving out the time to do stuff that's proactive. | ||
| And that's both taking care of yourself and being physical and getting out there and also getting to spend time with my family and my girls and all that. | ||
| But it's also, I mean, I could spend all of my time, 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. | ||
| I mean, it's like I also spend a ton of time 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 enabling more creators and enabling more people to have a voice there. | ||
| I mean, 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 and the world so that way more people can pursue creative endeavors. | ||
| I think that's just going to be one of the most positive trends that comes out of this decade. | ||
| I agree with you 100% on that. | ||
| It's really an amazing time for people to be able to carve out an alternative living and to do so through social media platforms. | ||
| There's so many people using all the platforms that have developed these followings and started businesses, whether it's in fitness or there's people that are just chefs that cook online and they share and sell recipes. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| 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 theme is, you know, 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 talking to you elsewhere. | ||
| And, you know, part of the question that I wonder about is in Instagram and in Facebook, You have your follow graph. | ||
| You have 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 up your alley. | ||
| It's aligned with the type of things that you care about, your values, your interests. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I tend to think about things in terms of more specific problems that you can break down and try to deliver value for people. | ||
| But I think I'd just love it if in, I don't know, a couple of years, a significant... | ||
| Not the majority, but a significant part of the Instagram and Facebook experiences were 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 who are using those experiences to discover more people, get more diversity of input into their lives, but also I think can help push that creative economy forward. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's one of the things that I'm super passionate about right now. | ||
| Having an algorithm like that could really help. | ||
| One of the things that Spotify does really well is suggest new music. | ||
| I love how they do that, where if you like a certain kind of music and you develop these playlists, they'll start recommending you music. | ||
| And I found out about so many different bands that I would never know about before. | ||
| The thing that gets people with algorithms is that algorithms today have this negative connotation to them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 it only Googled puppies. | ||
| And he only YouTube puppies. | ||
| And that's all they recommended to 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 is some tricky program designed by the communist government to try to get you to argue with each other. | ||
| No, you're arguing. | ||
| You like to argue. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, 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 there's this idea in designing recommendation systems of explore versus exploit 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 5%, 10% of basically the experience to just try to expose people to different things to see if they're interested in that too ends up paying long-term dividends. | ||
| So 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 build some stuff that gets really good over time. | ||
| But I do think that the design of the system and the values that go into it matters quite a bit too. | ||
| I think so, too. | ||
| I'm neither pro nor con algorithms or recommendations. | ||
| I think it's a fascinating aspect of social media, but I do think that there are certain people that, unfortunately, when they get excited about a thing or when they start going online, they gravitate towards things that irritate them and upset them. | ||
| And that's the big concern that many people have with algorithms and with the use of social media, Twitter in particular, is 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. | ||
| And I think that these things have different charges to them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, Twitter, I agree. | ||
| It's like you're on it and it's 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 I find that it's hard to spend a lot of time on Twitter without getting too upset. | ||
| On the flip side, I think Instagram is a super positive space. | ||
| I think some of the critique that we get there is that it's very curated and potentially in some ways overly positive. | ||
| But I think the energy on Instagram is generally very positive and it's easy to spend time there and kind of just absorb a lot of the positivity. | ||
| I think that's true, but how did that happen? | ||
| Why is Instagram generally friendlier? | ||
| I mean, so, it's the design of the system, but one thing is I think images are... | ||
| A little less cutting, usually, and kind of critical than text. | ||
| I think the news in general is often negative. | ||
| I think the incentives of the news industry are often to... | ||
| Well, I think just the mission of the news industry is to kind of 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 generally has this very critical tone to it. | ||
| But with everything, there's just a balance. | ||
| If you spend your whole life living in criticism, then that's super negative. | ||
| But I think that what we've tried to do with Facebook is have a little bit of both. | ||
| Facebook has images and videos, but it also has news. | ||
| And the part of it that's probably the most critical where we probably have the most controversies around the more newsy type stuff, the more political type stuff. | ||
| And over time, I've generally just felt like Hey, that's not even what people in our community tell us that they want. | ||
| People say that they come here because they want to connect with other people and explore interests. | ||
| So I just want to emphasize that more of it. | ||
| But there are some very intentional decisions that you can make in terms of designing this stuff. | ||
| So for example, on Facebook, when you're reacting to a post, in addition to liking it, you can heart it, you can give it kind of an angry emotion. | ||
| And One of the decisions that we've basically made is if someone gives an angry reaction, we actually don't even count that in terms of whether to show that to someone else or maybe we even discount it. | ||
| So you could kind of view it as, okay... | ||
| Someone chose 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 I kind of view us as here to do. | ||
| So we're just going to basically take that signal and, like, not use it to show the post to more people. | ||
| So how do you do that? | ||
| Like, how do you decide, like, what if it's anger but it's justifiable anger? | ||
| Yeah, I think that this is—that's exactly the right question, is— Is basically, you know, when I was making that decision internally, 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| 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 negative if they don't like it. | ||
| But I don't view our job as going and 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. | ||
| So is it like a thumbs down? | ||
| Yeah, it's like an angry emoji face. | ||
| 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 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 try to intentionally mute the kind of angry reactions just because that's just not what we're trying to do in the world. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| What do you think about the argument that algorithms in general, because the fact that they sort of appeal to human nature, like they amplify the things that you're interested in, and unfortunately people are interested oftentimes in things that upset them. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It's like I want that update. | ||
| And like and we know that that's valuable even without knowing the – even if we don't understand the kind of specific content of what she posted, there's going to be a ton of people commenting congrats and, you know, a ton of hearts and positive reactions. | ||
| So that's the question there. | ||
| Like, how does that... | ||
| Enter into the algorithm like if if you're gonna 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 had the baby and 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 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... | ||
| Are they liking or hearting? | ||
| Those are some of the big signals. | ||
| And then 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 going to 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 500 posts today, that's the one that has the most 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. | ||
| You don't want businesses spamming and you don't want to miss obviously important stuff. | ||
| Is there a way to stop businesses from spamming that you could just limit the amount of times they could post in a day? | ||
| I mean, there are a bunch of things like this that we've tried over time. | ||
| But then you start getting into some things that are basically pretty algorithmic or rules-based, which is like you start trying to rank stuff based on the quality of the posts or how much engagement they make. | ||
| I mean, I guess you could tell people they can't share more than this amount. | ||
| But, I don't know. | ||
| It kind of feels to me like 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. | ||
| 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 troubles 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 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 is it like having that kind of responsibility? | ||
| Because it seems to me that that would be an immense burden. | ||
| 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 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 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 TikTok that's growing incredibly quickly. | ||
| There's a whole lot of other companies. | ||
| We talked about Twitter before. | ||
| You talked about Snap. | ||
| YouTube is huge, and people spend a ton of time on it, and there's just new social products all the time. | ||
| So if we don't empower people and help people get and advance their own goals, then we lose over time. | ||
| So I kind of think that that... | ||
| 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 a very competitive marketplace. | ||
| And our role in it is not to imprint our opinion, but to empower people. | ||
| And that's sort of the ethos where we started the company. | ||
| The initial mission statement is, give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. | ||
| And we've evolved that over time to now making it around building community and bringing people and bringing the world closer together. | ||
| But it's fundamentally 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, we pay the price for it. | ||
| And people don't like those things that we do. | ||
| And then we have to run them back. | ||
| Well, that goes back to managing at scale, right? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Because you're just dealing with so many different people. | ||
| But what I'm saying essentially is 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. | ||
| 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 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 recommendation systems You kind of want to build those to be agnostic of the type of content. | ||
| If I see that a team 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 gives them that. | ||
| And then every once in a while, I think that 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 going to not take into account the angry reaction. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It's probably the case that there would be more engagement on the platform if we didn't. | ||
| It's like people are expressing something and we're choosing to not listen to that thing. | ||
| 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, we're here not just to focus on what content people see, but the kind of emotional sense. | ||
| But I try to make those very few 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 basically having humility and basically I don't know, just valuing humanity and 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. | ||
| They believe what they believe for a reason and it's kind of good to generally let people express that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's a pretty deeply held belief 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let's see if 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 you don't even realize... | ||
| The people think they're arguing with real people and they're reading the opinions of real people. | ||
| Meanwhile, there's a guy with a bank of phones in Macedonia. | ||
| Yeah, no, so we call this... | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| 19 of 20 Christian Facebook pages are fake. | ||
| Yeah, so we call what you're talking about coordinated inauthentic behavior. | ||
| Coordinated inauthentic behavior. | ||
| So it's basically coordinated, right? | ||
| Some of these policy acronyms that we come up with, they have to be very specific, right? | ||
| Yeah, I get it. | ||
| But basically, we have a team of hundreds of counterterrorism and counterintelligence people I don't know who's behind those fake pages, but the Macedonian troll farms were basically a bunch of spammers who created fake pages and they wanted people to click on them so they could 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 sovereignty motivated. | ||
| So there, I think you just kind of need to be very vigilant and 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 tens of thousands of people working on this at the company. | ||
| I think we spend like... | ||
| $5 billion a year was the last stat on sort of all this community integrity work. | ||
| I mean, it's like our kind of defense budget, it's like... | ||
| I mean, just to put the numbers in perspective... | ||
| I love that you call it defense budget. | ||
| Basically, it's like... | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| To defend the integrity of the community. | ||
| But it's like... | ||
| I mean, it is, I think, bigger than the defense budgets of probably most countries. | ||
| But 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 discussions, which is like, all right, so I think almost everyone will agree that, like, that's bad, right? | ||
| Like, you don't want, you know, countries basically creating networks of bots trying to convince people of stuff. | ||
| You don't want terrorism, right? | ||
| You don't want child pornography. | ||
| Like, you don't want people inciting literal violence. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But then the question is, okay, so you build these capabilities to try to find this stuff, and it's a combination of basically humans, really expert humans, and really powerful AI systems working together. | ||
| But sometimes they get it wrong, and then we end up taking down accounts that we weren't supposed to take down. | ||
| And that sucks, right? | ||
| Because then we're kind of getting in the way of people expressing legitimate things. | ||
| There's, you know, no system is ever going to be perfect, so the question is, you know, do you want more, I don't know, false positives or false negatives? | ||
| Do you want there to be more kind of fake Christian pages, or do you want to accidentally take down, I don't know, what was the example recently of, like, the comedian who had a profile photo that had kind of a gun in it, and that we accidentally took down the This guy's page. | ||
| We were talking about this before. | ||
| Oh, Kill Tony? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the Kill Tony podcast. | ||
| Yeah, so it's like, alright, so some AI system was just like, alright, that's clearly violence, right? | ||
| It's like the profile picture literally has a kind of rifle sight and a gun that shows the guy dying. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| So, I mean, that sucks. | ||
| This is some of the stuff that... | ||
| I mean, this hurts me, right? | ||
| Because when we take down something that That we're not supposed to. | ||
| I mean, that is like... | ||
| I mean, that's the worst. | ||
| How do you discern? | ||
| Say, like, these Christian Facebook pages. | ||
| 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, but really what they're doing is trying to talk shit about Joe Biden and get people to vote Republican in the midterms. | ||
| Like, how... | ||
| How do you know whether someone's real or not? | ||
| 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 5%. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And, you know, 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 think estimating the overall prevalence 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Because 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, you know, especially in countries that have laws around that are, like, coming from someone who's a valid citizen or, like, at least in that place. | ||
| So there's a bunch of... | ||
| I think... | ||
| One theme in my worldview around this stuff, when it gets to some of the stuff that we talked about before, is I don't think that this stuff is black and white or that you're ever going to have a perfect AI system. | ||
| I think it's all trade-offs all the way down. | ||
| And you could either 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 And say, okay, no, the cost of taking out any number of good guys is too high, so we're going to tolerate having just a little bit more bad guys on the system. | ||
| These are values questions, right, around what do you value more? | ||
| And 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 when 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? | ||
| 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 – I run the company and I can't just abdicate that. | ||
| 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 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 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 human rights issues. | ||
| 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 maybe some of them go up to me, although I don't spend a ton of my time 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 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 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 New York Post. | ||
| Yeah, so you guys censored that as well? | ||
| So we took a different path than Twitter. | ||
| I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. | ||
| 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... | ||
| 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. | ||
| We didn't do that. | ||
| What we do is we have... | ||
| If something's reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also have 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 determined whether it was false, 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. | ||
| So when you say the distribution has decreased, how does that work? | ||
| Basically, the ranking in newsfeed was a little bit less. | ||
| So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. | ||
| By what percentage? | ||
| I don't know off the top of my head, but it's meaningful. | ||
| But basically, a... | ||
| A lot of people were still able to share it. | ||
| We got a lot of complaints that that was the case. | ||
| 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 we weren't sort of as black and white about it as Twitter. | ||
| We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it's 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? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't remember if it was that specifically, but 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it sucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, because it turned out after the fact, I mean, the fact checkers looked into it, no one was able to say it was false, right? | ||
| So basically it had this period where it was getting lists distribution. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| But I think it probably sucks, though, I think in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent in the end sucks. | ||
| It still sucks that you had to go through a criminal trial, but at the end you're free. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| We still let people share it. | ||
| 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 and it turns out to be bullshit? | ||
| 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, 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 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 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 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 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, they're pretty smart about what they release and what they don't release. | ||
| If they're going over some data from a laptop and you could talk to a person, but again, this is just one story, one individual story. | ||
| How many of these pop up every day, especially in regards to polarizing issues? | ||
| Like climate change or COVID or foreign policy or Ukraine. | ||
| Anytime there's 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. | ||
| 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 agree. | ||
| And it's like, to be in your spot, and one of the things that I really wanted to talk to you about is this, because 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 fuck 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 accept that some team at Meta or that I personally am making all these decisions. | ||
| And I think people should be skeptical about 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 U.S. You know, I mean, folks like Michael McConnell, who's, I mean, he's a Stanford professor, who's like, just he was, I forget which Republican president appointed him, but I mean, he was, I think, going to be considered for the Supreme Court at some point. | ||
| I mean, he's a very... | ||
| and kind of celebrated 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. | ||
| And that's a step in the right direction. | ||
| I mean, in the Hunter Biden case that you talked about before, I don't want our company to decide what's misinformation and what's not. | ||
| So we work with third parties and basically let different organizations do that. | ||
| Now, I mean, then you have the question of, are those organizations biased or not? | ||
| And 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. | ||
|
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So... | |
| I'd say this is not a solved problem. | ||
| Controversies aren't going away. | ||
| You know, I think that there's... | ||
| It is interesting that the U.S., It's actually more polarized than most other countries. | ||
| So I think sitting in the US, it'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 US. But But for better or worse, it does seem like the next several years do seem like they're set up to be quite polarized. | ||
| So I tend to agree with you. | ||
| There are going to be a bunch of different decisions like this that come up. | ||
| 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... | ||
| I'll obviously have to be involved, our teams. | ||
| Nick Clegg, who I appointed to be the president for all the policy issues for the company, and he was formerly the deputy prime minister in the UK, a successful politician there, and very well-versed in government and all those political issues. | ||
| We'll have to do some part of this, but I think also kind of getting to more and more independent governance is going to be an important part of how we deal with this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think there's probably a media environment issue that predates the internet, right? | ||
| So I think we have sort of, 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 there's all this talk about filter bubbles on the internet, but I think even predating this, going back to the 70s or 80s when Fox News and all these other cable, these prominent media organizations were established, I think that that has had a long-term effect and people have studied that. | ||
| But there might also be something about just the way that our governance is set up where we have two parties. | ||
| We have these primaries that basically make it so that it's almost like you're not promoting people who are trying to be 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 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 definition just allow there to be more candidates on more parts of the spectrum. | ||
| But I want to be careful about not talking too far out of school because I'm not a political scientist. | ||
| But I've obviously spent a little bit of time thinking about this because... | ||
| 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 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 that really is not the primary thing that's going on. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I mean, 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 who get to vote on each side, you're promoting this ideological adherence instead of reasonable ideas that people can enjoy or not enjoy and resonate with or not. | ||
| 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 an unfortunate aspect of some people that they spend a lot of time distracted on things that don't immediately affect them. | ||
| But those things become their main focus in life. | ||
| And I think that's a distraction that's almost like a form of procrastination that people get involved with. | ||
| And it just seems like a natural thing with people. | ||
| I think it's a time management issue, and I think it's a discipline issue. | ||
| And I think some people have never really been taught time management or discipline, especially in 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 in terms of, like, I'm very careful with time management. | ||
| Because, like, anything that's going to take up too much time, that's not net benefit, that's not – I'm not enjoying or is going to wind up being a negative thing, I just – I'm not interested. | ||
| But I've developed this over time to recognize, like, that's a trap. | ||
| Get out of there. | ||
| Like, you can't put out all the fires. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| You're not going to change the landscape. | ||
| That's what voting's for. | ||
| You're not going to change people's opinions. | ||
| If you want to make interesting videos and post them on Facebook, okay. | ||
| If you want to talk about things and have a perspective that you think is really well-formed and it's compelling, Go ahead and make that. | ||
| But 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 do people have control over 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 it's not that the other issues aren't important, right? | ||
| And national civic issues, I mean, they matter. | ||
| But there probably is a healthy balance. | ||
| Where, yeah, I mean, this just goes back to the time management conversation we were 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 really a thing around kind of narrowing the aperture in your life to, like, what's around you, the people you care about. | ||
| I think that that does drive a lot of happiness for people. | ||
| So I think it's one of the interesting questions is how do we balance now having access to a 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 maybe that energy needs to come balanced over a longer period of time or something. | ||
| I tend to think that all the transparency that we've gotten from social media will lead to good progress on a lot of things. | ||
| But I do think it can, if you just focus on kind of broader issues and not, if you don't focus. | ||
| I do think that there's a certain thing about people's happiness that has to come from, you know, what's right around you in your world. | ||
| Most definitely. | ||
| And that's not to say that you shouldn't get upset about important issues and express yourselves. | ||
| It's just a matter of how much time you're spending on it. | ||
| Unless you're really disciplined and really careful with your time, you can get sucked into these things and you could waste your life just arguing with people online. | ||
| 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 shit to them on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I always tell them, like, don't do that. | ||
| Like, it's really bad for you. | ||
| Yeah, and I struggle with this, too. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Well, I mean, on the one hand, some of this is free product feedback. | ||
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Right. | |
| So, I mean, so, like, I actually think this is, like, one of the hard things about it. | ||
| You don't want to be so closed that you're not listening to criticism because then you're not going to grow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I struggle with this. | ||
| I do sometimes feel like I need to... | ||
| I do want to try to understand all of the different perspectives that people have. | ||
| But the thing that's tough is that a lot of those people aren't necessarily trying to help us build something better. | ||
| And there is just a lot of negativity and it gets to you. | ||
| 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 consider alternative viewpoints, but then you could spend all your time looking at critique that's not necessarily trying to be constructive, and then that's just going to be super negative for your mental health. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, I think probably a lot of the happiest and most productive people are, at least they're, I don't think you're ever going to 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 what you want to push forward and things in your life that matter, I think that's just really important to 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, they don't have real feelings, and you're just trying to say the most biting, mean, and cutting thing that you can. | ||
| And that's unfortunate. | ||
| I don't do that. | ||
| I used to engage in it. | ||
| Like, I used to argue with people back and forth, and then I realized, like, what am I doing? | ||
| Like, this is not good. | ||
| I always feel like shit. | ||
| I never feel good. | ||
| Even if I win the arguments, it doesn't feel good. | ||
| You're filled with anxiety, and then a new fire starts up in the comments. | ||
| You know, like, someone else will jump in, and then you've got a new opponent, and like, what are you doing? | ||
| Like, that's a... | ||
| Massive resource problem. | ||
| It's a giant issue in whether or not you want to focus on important things in life or whether you want to win these little verbal battles between people on Twitter or Facebook. | ||
| It's not necessary. | ||
| It's just for allocation of resources. | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| What we hear from our community is that that's not what people want to spend their time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| But I think a lot of the time, even if people's revealed preferences of what they actually spend their time on are different, there's some truth and aspiration to what they think they want to spend their time on that there's some truth and aspiration to what they think they want to spend their time on that there is some long-term | ||
| So that's why I've just consciously tried to just downplay a lot of the political controversy on the services a bit and What do people come to our services for? | ||
| It's connecting with other people. | ||
| Expressing what matters to you, which for most people isn't some big global issue. | ||
| It's something that matters in their life. | ||
| What's going on with my kid's life? | ||
| How's my wife doing? | ||
| What's going on in my local community? | ||
| I think that there's something that's powerful about being able to focus more on that and be a bit more grounded in that. | ||
| It's not that we do that perfectly, but 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 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 just what matters to you and your friend group. | ||
| What's more kind of local to you than the specific people that you have relationships with? | ||
| I mean, that's the appeal. | ||
| 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 already approved and on television and in the media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We sort of get this, particularly about videos, right? | ||
| Videos are a really interesting example of 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 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 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 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... | ||
| I mean, I think live interactions, like what we're having now, I think that's hopefully an interesting discussion for people who are watching. | ||
| But I think if you look at common threads like you're talking about, I think that that experience probably needs a significant amount of innovation before it's good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because when I see a friend has some opinion on something, I know where that person's coming from in terms of their values and their life story. | ||
| And that just means a lot more to me than, I don't know, the New York Times telling me that something is good or bad. | ||
| And there's also a lot of diversity because people tend to have friends who are from different backgrounds. | ||
| And before the internet, I think the average person basically had a few different media sources. | ||
| Each one had some kind of specific editorial leaning. | ||
| Now, the data that I've seen on this actually is 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 agree with, there's a... | ||
| 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 being exposed to that point of view. | ||
| So that's another area that we and the rest of the industry might be able to improve on over time. | ||
| But I think that this notion around filter bubbles and people only see one type of 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 online from different sources is way greater 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 oftentimes fact checkers are incorrect, and they are biased, and it is subjective as to whether or not what is a fact and what is not a fact, especially about some more controversial issues. | ||
| Like, how do you choose fact checkers, and how does a fact checker 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 and like professional discipline around fact checking where, I mean, these organizations are supposed to basically, they get accredited and they're generally, I think, quite professional about how they do this. | ||
| Generally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 outsourced that to this accreditation. | ||
| I mean, it's widely respected as sort of the best that there is, even though 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 opinion-y, right? | ||
| So there are things online that are, like, obviously... | ||
| I don't know, just like obviously kind of wrong memes or I don't know, 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 candidate 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 working the way it's supposed to, 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 get rid of that, then it's like people on both sides of the political spectrum 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, a lot of the stuff that's blatantly wrong isn't necessarily even political. | ||
| It's just like stupid shit. | ||
| So those are the areas that I've seen that become the most controversial. | ||
| How do you make decisions when, like, I can understand the wanting to 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, have you ever Googled hashtag space is fake? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| You should. | ||
| I'm not sure I have enough time for that. | ||
| There's a large group of humans out there that believe that we live in some sort of a dome and that there's essentially light bulbs hung in the sky. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| But I mean, what do you do about that? | ||
| If I was running Facebook, I would let that stay. | ||
| I would leave that in there. | ||
| That's so dumb. | ||
| So one important nuance on this, though, is we don't block misinformation. | ||
| We basically just have a label that goes on it that says that a fact checker says this is false and show it a little bit less in the ranking and news feed. | ||
| But don't you stop a person's ability to share something with that tag? | ||
| No, 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. | ||
| I mean, we can go super deep on all the nuances. | ||
| 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 going to 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 cousins, you know, giving birth photo or that, we'll kind of show the other content above it. | ||
| But fundamentally, we're not going to prevent you from sharing it 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 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 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, you don't want foreign nations interfering, like the bot networks. | ||
| You don't want terrorism. | ||
| You don't want child pornography. | ||
| You don't want 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. | ||
| It's like people want it gone and they expect us to, as a technology company that operates at scale, to be able to do this reasonably well. | ||
| So then I think that 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 miss something that is bad. | ||
| So there's that type of issue, which is like you just make an operational mistake, which is important, but is kind of one type of issue. | ||
| Then I think you get into the types. | ||
| There are a couple of types of issues, and I think misinformation is probably the biggest one. | ||
| Where there is actually just not widespread agreement at all about how to handle it. | ||
| I think that a large percent of the population, the vast majority, says that they don't want to see misinformation, but then people disagree on what misinformation is, right? | ||
| So people don't want to see what they think is misinformation, but honestly, even more than that, they don't want other people to be To see what they think is misinformation. | ||
| 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 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, right? | ||
| The Taliban is on Twitter, which is really wild because Donald Trump isn't. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not super deep on Twitter's policies, so tough for me to comment on that. | ||
| Well, Twitter has pornography. | ||
| I mean, they have hardcore pornography. | ||
| You could just accidentally stumble onto someone you follow's page and they'll have hardcore pornography. | ||
| Yeah, so that's something that just is more of, going back to your point around just for the community feel, But pornography is a thing that we don't allow. | ||
| And I think it's somewhat controversial. | ||
| Because, I mean, you could make a pretty good argument, I think, that 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... | ||
| I'd say our reason for not wanting pornography is more for the feel of the community than kind of the sense of harm. | ||
| And obviously child pornography is different. | ||
| That's obviously real harm. | ||
| But I think that's one category of content where it's kind of more of an editorial moderation decision. | ||
| I don't think it's a political decision. | ||
| It's more of like we want the feel of the service to be about people connecting with their friends and family and not necessarily coming across that kind of content. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, that's sort of, I think, how the whole thing breaks down. | ||
| I mean, there's most of the stuff 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, and basically don't take it down, but basically let people share the stuff, but also flag if an accredited fact checker said it might be false, and also get us that 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 a fact checker, then it'll get somewhat less... | ||
| Just that post or all of their posts is for the future? | ||
| I think that if you do it once, then it's that. | ||
| And then I think if there's some history within a page or there's kind of different rules for pages and groups and different things, then there can be some kind of broader policy that applies. | ||
|
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But... | |
| When I look into this stuff, because a lot of my friends and people I know just send me examples, because unfortunately there are a lot of mistakes. | ||
| I think part of the issue is that, okay, if there's 3.5 billion people using these services, and if we make a mistake 0.1% of the time, that's like... | ||
| Still, millions of mistakes. | ||
| So there's all these cases, and that sucks. | ||
| There are all these cases where we missed something that we should have taken down, or we enforced something that we weren't supposed to. | ||
| But I'd say, as it relates 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 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 there was some bug in the system or some system didn't work the way it was supposed to, which is a real issue, but it's not an ideological issue. | ||
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And... | |
| A lot of the time, also, when people are worried about stuff like shadow banning, it actually, like, maybe their post just wasn't as good or something, 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 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 I kind of want to understand what these issues are. | ||
| That's an example where it's like it had nothing to do with your account. | ||
| It was basically there was some bug and that person had kind of taken a bunch of actions quickly or something and we basically just for spam protection stopped them from taking a bunch of actions. | ||
| So I think people sometimes read in some ideological bent or policy thing into this that I think often isn't there. | ||
| But unfortunately there just are Because the scale is so big, there are 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 haven't figured out how to crack that nut of kind of communicating. | ||
| It's also an interesting problem because people don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. | ||
| So there's this sort of, in their eyes, a lack of transparency. | ||
| It's like, how does this all work? | ||
| So they assume there's nefarious intentions and that someone's censoring them. | ||
| I'm curious how you'd think about this if you were in my position. | ||
| I've thought about it. | ||
| I would imagine it would be incredibly overwhelming, and I'd probably be on Xanax. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Or you'd just work out more. | ||
| Just work out more. | ||
| I wouldn't take Xanax. | ||
| You'd just steal more MMA. But the amount of foreign countries that you're dealing with, too. | ||
| I mean, you have Facebook in how many languages? | ||
| Oh, I don't even know. | ||
| I mean, we just ruled out an AI tool that allows us to translate posts to all these languages where they're – it's like just – Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's like hundreds of – I think it's more than 100 languages. | ||
| Well, I love to use that on Instagram, like especially because I follow a lot of jujitsu guys. | ||
| They'll say something in Portuguese and I can click the translation. | ||
| That's there. | ||
| That should be there. | ||
| Yeah, no, it is there. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| It's really nice, but the amount of countries that are using this and talk, like, I wouldn't even want to just pay attention to the people that are speaking English. | ||
| If you're trying to moderate all the people that are speaking, you know, a million different languages, like, how? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I can't imagine. | ||
| This is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is when you first started Facebook... | ||
| You clearly could have never imagined that it would become what it is now. | ||
| What was it like going through the stages of growth of this thing where, oh great, it's successful. | ||
| Oh hey, Facebook is taking up. | ||
| Holy shit, we're overthrowing governments. | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| What is this thing now? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And now with WhatsApp and you have Instagram and you have Oculus, you have all this going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Am I freaking you out just thinking about it? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I've spent a long time... | ||
| Yeah, it's like, breathe deeply. | ||
| No, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. | ||
| Don't imagine. | ||
| It's like, why us? | ||
| What happened that we were the ones who built this? | ||
| Like me and this group of people. | ||
| Where's MySpace? | ||
| Where'd it go? | ||
| Yeah, you know? | ||
| Here's my reflection on this. | ||
| And I'm curious for your view on if you think this is just crazy. | ||
| But when I was getting started, I remember... | ||
| The night that I launched the original Facebook website at my college, it was just a website for my college. | ||
| It was literally a Facebook. | ||
| 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 and 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. | ||
| It was not even a possibility for me that that was going to be us. | ||
| It was completely obvious that it was going to be someone else. | ||
| It was like, we're just college kids. | ||
| Who are we to do this? | ||
| You have Google and Microsoft and Yahoo at the time, these great technology companies that have thousands of engineers and all these servers and all these resources. | ||
| It just wasn't even a question. | ||
| It wasn't even a hope that I had that we would do it. | ||
| But then, okay... | ||
| So we just kind of kept going. | ||
| So we launched it at Harvard and then... | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| 2004. And a bunch of students from other schools started writing in. | ||
| And as soon as I optimized the code and basically got... | ||
| I could make it set... | ||
| I could run this at more colleges at the same time. | ||
| I started launching at more colleges and like... | ||
| Launched it at like two more colleges at a time, like every week. | ||
| And it just kind of kept on going. | ||
| I think a lot of people just kind of wrote it off. | ||
| It was this thing that a lot of people in colleges loved, but people were like, okay, that's kind of a kid thing. | ||
| 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 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 naysaying against why this was a valuable thing. | ||
| So then, okay, then the people who were 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 college thing to this is a fad, right? | ||
| Because people, you know, you mentioned 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 going to 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... | ||
| Inside Google or Microsoft, there were probably people who thought that this would be a cool thing to do and go build this, but probably a bunch of bureaucracy and people naysaying on it. | ||
| So we just kept on going. | ||
| And then the next meme was, oh, it's never going to be a good business. | ||
| Okay, so there's 100 million people using it. | ||
| They've been going for like five or six years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it's not a fad. | ||
| Maybe people can keep on using it. | ||
| But I mean, there's only one good internet ads business, and it's Google. | ||
| So it's like the chance that someone can invent another one, that seems really low. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It shouldn't have been us. | ||
| People had more resources all along the way and cared more. | ||
| And I've just found that that's actually sort of something that I've noticed in other areas too. | ||
| So if you notice, if you think about what Elon's doing with rockets, or what we're trying to do with the metaverse, 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. | ||
| Or, I don't know, I think I think like kind of care is probably undervalued in terms of determining what who ends up doing what in the world. | ||
| I think most people probably have an assumption of something that is so obviously true to you that you just assume that other people are going to go do it. | ||
| But just because it's so obvious to you doesn't actually mean that it's that obvious to other people. | ||
| You probably have this around a lot of the stuff that you do, the stuff that you talk about, the way you explore all these different topics on your podcast, the way you do comedy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I'm curious if you've had that experience where you feel like those things are just 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. | ||
| If you think about it, Google tried to do it with Google+. | ||
| I remember I had a good friend that worked at Google. | ||
| But it was too late then. | ||
| Yeah, it was too late. | ||
| I was joking around with her. | ||
| I'm like, this is dog shit. | ||
| This is never going anywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's terrible. | |
| And they didn't have an original idea. | ||
| I mean, you can come late to something as long as you sort of have a unique contribution that you can bring to this place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But they didn't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you were 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 beta version of some new Facebook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can't build the same thing six years later. | ||
| You have to add... | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't compelling. | ||
| Well, it is interesting, though, because it's like 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. | ||
| 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 getting smaller. | ||
| It just keeps getting bigger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is nuts. | ||
| Like, you have three billion people and it's getting bigger. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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're like, just pawn it off to somebody else and... | ||
| I'm not sure if that'll be the reason. | ||
| I think I'm probably going to do this for a while just because I kind of viewed the phases of the company as the first phase was building Facebook. | ||
| It was like, okay, can we build a social product that's super successful and successful? | ||
| We did. | ||
| We basically made the most used service in the world. | ||
| And then it's like, okay, once you're lucky, but can we do this multiple times? | ||
| And then that's when 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 super early. | ||
| When 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 created it. | ||
| Kevin and Mike. | ||
| And did a lot of awesome work together. | ||
| And then the WhatsApp folks joined. | ||
| I think there were about 60 people working at WhatsApp. | ||
| These were super early things when they joined us. | ||
| But, and we've scaled both of those two. | ||
| I mean, WhatsApp now is, you know, more than two billion people. | ||
| Instagram is, I don't think it's quite two billion yet, but it's basically, it's on its way. | ||
| So, and then Messenger, 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 force. | ||
| It's like, all right, that's pretty good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I just think phones are very limited. | ||
| So I think for the next chapter of 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... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My outlook, though, on 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 for me... | ||
| For the first maybe 15 years of building the company, I was really just solely focused on, let's connect more people. | ||
| Let's grow this community to be bigger and bigger. | ||
| Let's grow the business to be bigger and bigger. | ||
| And now, I obviously care about that. | ||
| 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 are some things that work, right? | ||
| So, like, building out the metaverse with VR 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 that's, like, something that I just want to kind of dedicate myself to. | ||
| Done a lot of stuff on the philanthropy side where I just, like, it's been really cool getting a chance to work with my wife Priscilla on this. | ||
| us 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 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 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 a century. | ||
| So for that, we're taking on 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... | ||
| And 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? | ||
| You know, you're blocked by the other tissue that's in the way. | ||
| But now, through a combination of different techniques, you can use this, like, cryo-EM technique, where you can, like, take certain tissue out of a person, and it still will be... | ||
| I mean, there are techniques 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 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, a neuron like fire and like what it looks like in the synapse of a brain before... | ||
| Like, in a living organism. | ||
| But 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 really understand what's going on in the brain, you need to see that, right? | ||
| So, I mean, that's the kind of project that we're doing 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've sort of broadened out... | ||
| It's not just... | ||
| For the first 10 years or so, the company was so all-consuming that I 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 become a little more balanced. | ||
| But... | ||
| But now I'd say there's projects at work. | ||
| There's projects in philanthropy. | ||
| There's also just personal stuff that I just really enjoy building up our ranch to be self-sustaining and 100% off the grid and being able to grow all the stuff that we want there and raise our own cattle. | ||
| I think that that's a cool, fun project too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I think what you're dealing with is you have so much success that you're comfortable enough for you to not think about just success and to only think about 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 might not even think are like the most financially viable? | ||
| They're just fascinating to you. | ||
| I think that's amazing. | ||
| I would love to see that in more people. | ||
| 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 have 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 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. | ||
| It's 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. | ||
| I have a similar perspective in that I don't think about my show in terms of how it grows or how it does well. | ||
| I just do what I like to do. | ||
| And I think as much about archery and jujitsu and playing pool 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 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 in talking to them. | ||
| So that's all it is. | ||
| There's no external pressure. | ||
| So it never feels like a job. | ||
| It's 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. | ||
| Let me see you take a real drink. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Honestly, the Senate testimony is not exactly an environment that is set up to accentuate the humanity of the subject. | ||
| It's quite the opposite, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, if you're up there for six or seven hours, you're going to make some face that's worth making a meme out of. | ||
| Right, and then they're just going to only concentrate on that. | ||
| And that's going to be the big deal. | ||
| But, you know, so I'm just fortunate that 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 it, I think the appeal of the show is that I'm actually interested 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 resonates with people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was going to say paradox. | ||
| I'm not sure if it's a paradox, but I think that there actually is a feedback loop between those things, I would guess, though. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'd bet that for me, if I were solely focused on just kind of 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. | ||
| I think that if we do good work on this, I think we should be positioning ourselves quite well for the future. | ||
| And I do care about winning 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 a brilliant gamble. | ||
| But it's also a very well-informed gamble. | ||
| Like, what you're doing is... | ||
| And you're not just gambling, you're innovating. | ||
| So 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 bullshit, It's so hard to know what's real and what's not real. | ||
| People value authenticity. | ||
| They value it in a really unique way. | ||
| And when someone can create a service or a social media platform or something where 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 Yeah. | ||
| Forever and make it constantly get bigger and make more money. | ||
| And 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| That's probably one of the reasons why it's so big. | ||
| And I think that applies to many, many, many things. | ||
| But I think people are oftentimes 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 it? | ||
| 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 big picture things and making it more enjoyable, making it more thrilling to me, making it more exciting. | ||
| 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, that is not confined in a communist country. | ||
| There's obviously a lot bigger problems that they have. | ||
| But you're in a position where you can make your own choices. | ||
| What would be the best choice to make? | ||
| Well, the best choice to make is to actually follow your interests. | ||
| What is actually fascinating to you? | ||
| And for you, the fact that you're really interested in health and philanthropy and And those things as well as also interested in the metaverse and interested in AR and VR and all these different modalities, all these different ways to express it and how enriching it is to people's lives. | ||
| It's fucking cool. | ||
| Just trying. | ||
| Well, you're succeeding, man. | ||
| I mean, it's obvious. | ||
| It's pretty dope. | ||
| And I think we're like three hours in. | ||
| So we can wrap it up here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you for coming. | ||
| It was really cool to meet you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I appreciate all the things you're doing and what you're saying. | ||
| And I'm so glad you're into martial arts now, too. | ||
| It's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awesome. | |
| Yeah, no, it's great to get a chance to do this. | ||
| Yeah, let's do it again sometime, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's do it. | |
| Whenever you have some new crazy shit coming out and whenever you take things to a new next level, come on in. | ||
| We'll talk. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Thank you. |
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