Transcript

#582: Mark Zuckerberg on Long-Term Strategy, Business and Parenting Principles, Personal Energy Management, Building the Metaverse, Seeking Awe, the Role of Religion, Solving Deep Technical Challenges (e.g., AR), and More

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Me and so Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. My guest today. Is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction. And product strategy.

for the company. In October of twenty twenty one, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps. And to focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse, a term you've no doubt heard in the last few weeks and months, moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality. To help build the next evolution in social technology. He is also the co-founder and the co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with his wife Priscilla. Which is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world's toughest challenges.

including supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure Prevent. or manage all diseases by the end of the twenty first century. Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California, beautiful place, in two thousand four. You can find him on Facebook, Facebook dot com slash Zuck, and on Instagram, Instagram.com Slash Zuck. Z U C K and Meta you can find of course at

meta M E T A.com. Just a few more comments before we dive in, and that is related to questions and subjects. I wanted to cover new ground with Mark. I did not want to rehash Questions and topics that have been covered a lot in in the media, whether by the New York Times or anyone else for that matter. And One of those topics is Ukraine. Because Meta has

spoken and published publicly about their ongoing efforts regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So you can read about them also in the show notes, Tim Dotblog slash podcast. And Mark has commented on these things already. If you want to learn about what I am doing on the front, you can go to Tim Dotblog slash Ukraine. But we had limited time in this conversation and I wanted to cover Subjects that would have some staying power, some relevance. moving forward six months, twelve months, maybe even several years when people are listening to this podcast in the future. So thank you very much for listening and I hope you enjoy this very wide ranging conversation with none other than Mark. Zuckerberg.

Mark, nice to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for making the time. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to this. You've had a very, very busy week, and I imagine most weeks are very busy, perhaps this week busier than some. But before we get to I wanted to flashback just a little bit. And in the course of doing research for this conversation, I'm going to have a lot of different

I Chanced upon fencing. Now fencing I had seen in connection with your name, but I had no idea that you had been as competitive. As you had been. And I was hoping you could just describe a little bit. your involvement with fencing and for people who don't know

What makes fencing interesting or what made it? Interesting to you. And I have follow up questions, but I have taken Two fencing. instructional lessons. This was maybe 10 years ago, and was inspired to do so because of the writing of Bruce Lee of all things. But Could you just describe your background with fencing?

And how you ended up competing. This is probably one of the more interesting places to start an interview that I've ever done. I fenced competitively when I was in high school. It's not something I I've But I'm not going to be able to

I've always loved sports. And You know, just being active. I like Problems that you can solve intellectually, but I I also just think managing your energy and kind of being out there and being physical has just always been a really important part of my life and

I was looking for a sport that would do this in the winter in high school. I did a bunch of running, right? So I did cross country and I did tennis. As well. So start doing fencing. And

I didn't do it competitively for a super long period of time, but The thing that I loved about it is it's Obviously very physical and cardio taxing. Just being kind of on your Feeton. Kind of bouncing around. But it's also very, very mental. I mean I just I I have these

Memories when I was in my high school chemistry classes. Of writing out sequences of moves that I wanted to try when I was like doing bouts later after school that day and Different things that you can do to Win in multiple ways basically. Try to

catch people off guard in one position. It's like okay, if they do power you, then you're still in a better position. You can get them on on on the left or something, or or if they don't, then then you then you get the touch. So I found it to be a very Very intellectual, but a good a good sport. I I was never that good at it. You know, I did it competitively. Went to some some state competitions and stuff like that, but I don't think I would have been good enough to do it at college, for example, but it's mostly it's a it's a fun thing to do. So the

The closest experience that I have is with kendo. I lived in Japan for a period of time and I did some Kendo And I think it shares quite a bit in common with fencing. Of course, the techniques are are quite different. The slashing movements predominate in Kendo. Although you are allowed to stab to the throat if you're past a certain age, which is all separate matter. But the idea of, as they might say in Brazilian Jiu Ju, this sort of position before submission is an interesting one, right? So even if your first attempt fails, you're in a superior position to execute on your next move. And it's always struck me that as much as people think of you as someone who studies

Or even predicts or Looks at trend lines into the future. Seems like you have quite a background in studying the past. And that's where I wanted to go next, which was Classic.

It seems like you've spent quite a bit of time. Studying classics. And I was wondering if there are any books or any figures who stick out to you. From that chapter in your life. Maybe that chapter continues to this day, but if you could speak to that, I figured well.

Use that as a segue to other things. I loved classics. I picked it up in high school as well. I started studying Latin. Because I was so bad at speaking French and Spanish. I'm very interested in in languages overall, but like the whole kind of thinking on your

feet and understanding like really quickly just I I'm I process things more methodically. So so Latin was more my style because You don't have to speak it, so you can just read it at at whatever whatever kind of pace makes sense. And then from there I got a degree can I actually thought that when I went to college, my plan at the time was to be a classics major. I it turned out I took no classics courses at Harvard. I ended up doing psychology and computer science, um were the two areas that

That I focused on but I just loved the discipline of of classics so much and the history. I mean philosophically is sort of the underpinning of of kind of Western thought. I think it's super interesting. But I've also just been very interested in Basically people who shape the way we live. Right. So the historical figures who I like learning about

And see, there's a set of people like Inventors. You know, people who just create things. And change the world through that. But I'm also very interested in

historical figures who Who kind of Try to Invent or usher in new ways for people to live. So I always thought.

You know, Augustus was a very interesting historical figure. And I mean one of the things I mean, he's controversial for a lot of reasons, and you know, you can debate all the good and bad, but one of the things that I thought was Just really stuck with me. What he did was When he basically Stop the wars.

You know, at the time in history There wasn't really a concept of perpetual peace. The concept of peace that they had at the time was was like this is just the temporary period. during which your enemies are too weak to fight you, but they're gonna come back. And he basically like

Ushered in this Notion of Actually trying to convert a lot of the military towards other trades because he's like all right, no, we're trying to like be more peaceful. We wanna Build a more positive sum economy.

Let's kind of do this in a way where we can get people doing more productive things. And I always thought that that was just a really interesting historical thing and and in some ways has parallels today. To some of the work. I think is going on in the tech industry around the whole creator economy. If you just think about how many people today Basically do jobs that they have to that they might not actually like that much if they're supporting themselves compared to where I I I think and hope that the world is going, which is just a

A much more robust. creative economy where way more people can do things that are kind of intellectually or physic interesting to them and In doing so, build up communities around that and have enough monetization and economy around that to kind of support that. That to me is is sort of like the modern version of of kind of how do you upgrade

The way that people live and work in to to kind of fulfill human potential. So I think there are a lot of interesting lessons from the past. I think you can also read into it too much, but I really enjoyed it when I when I studied it. Where I'm going here across a broad spectrum is is trying to and we are going to talk about the creator economy and the potential of that and also questions around it.

And Right now, what I'm hoping to learn more about are some of the influences. And influences can take many forms. One would be Books and I wanna ask this is from a profile in the New Yorker from two thousand ten. And I remember this because I noticed it before I read it in the New Yorker at the time, which was For a period of time I think the only book

that was on your profile on Facebook was Enders Game. Yeah. It's a great book. It is a great book. It was one of my favorites. I was hoping you could Explain why Ender's game.

And then if there are any other Books that you have in particular that come to mind re read or say gifted to other people what those might be. But if we could start with Ender's game. Since it is also a personal favorite of mine, I'd love to know why Andre's game. I actually don't think it has any unique significance. I so I'm I'm surprised to hear that it was the only thing on my profile, but I do love it. It's a it's a great book. I mean I think that kind of science fiction

Not just a Exploring There's certain technologies, but it's also a very compelling story. It has good Moral lessons. There are parts of the

The technology And things in it like the Ansible for faster than light communication across the galaxy. That We had a project um at our company that we had codename that we're all focused on communication. I can't really speak to you. I'm not actually sure why it was the only thing on my profile that Oh, just the only book.

Yeah, not the only thing. Yeah, I don't Um I don't I don't think it has Some kind of unique significance in my life. But I I love science fiction. I mean I have spent a lot of time reading that. I think it's Often a good way. You

Kind of understand what's possible. You know, in recent years You know, for the last decade as I've gotten more into virtual and augmented reality and actually starting to build some of these things more. And I've certainly spent a lot of time reading the science fiction and going back and revisiting a bunch of the books around that. And it's it's just it's really fascinating to me to see. kind of what people predict and

What the sociological phenomena that people predict around this stuff as well. Are there any books in particular, writers in particular? I mean uh one who comes to mind for me would be Ted Chang, who's written a number of short story collections like Exhalation, which seem to include a lot of potential kind of right around the corner, right? Near near future speculative fiction. Any books come to mind that You've done just in the course of of reading in the last few years.

Whether related to VR, AR or otherwise. There's some that are just classics around this. I mean I think at this point anyone who's interested in this space would read Ready Player One and Snow crash. And is one that is maybe not as commonly cited. But I think is maybe

the augmented reality sort of equivalent of some of the the seminal works that talk about virtual reality. One of the things that I think is pretty interesting about all of these is that They sort of pause it. That the world is in some sort of dystopian state. And that I think is very different from kind of how how I think about this. I think that there are all these reasons why.

It is. very valuable for people to be able to be present in another place. No matter what their their situation is. I mean I I kind of laugh about this sometimes when I I like Mm. Family has a

We we love going down to Kawaii and it's beautiful there and we'll be out there and I'll I'll I love surfing, I love doing a lot of stuff, but I also love being in in VR when I'm when I'm there too. So it's obviously that's not you know, that's not some kind of dystopian thing. But I I think that just if you look at like Equalizing opportunity across the world. You don't have to be in some kind of dystopian situation to want to be present with another person who you care about or an opportunity that's better in another place. So That to me always struck me as a very interesting theme of that science fiction. Point. In terms of like exploring sociologically and technologically what's gonna happen, I've always found it pretty fascinating.

Let's talk about long term. planning and long term bets for a second. I find you particularly Interesting in this respect because you're a founder CEO. with sort of uh a lot of founder driven control. You're you're in a sense, you know, one of the last of a generation. And you can make long term bets. And I know when we were chatting, I guess last week a bit

You mentioned having a fifty. Correct me if I'm wrong, but like a fifteen year roadmap. Four. metaverse, right? And What I'd love to ask you

Is How you manage, say, the short term or the intermediate term Within the company with employees, right? Because if you look at say Instagram, WhatsApp, the bet's paid off, but at the time There's a lot of scrutiny.

You know, the media had sort of had a field day and by and large were wrong. But I'm I'm wondering. Since Those types of bets are not necessarily obvious in the moment to everyone involved. How do you think about

Managing Internally. when you are making these long term bets. It's hard. And I don't think that there's Just one

Way to do it. People are psychologically much more interested and capable of focusing on a long term outcome when they feel secure in the near term. So When there's a lot of near term thrash or

Prospects don't look good or The market is down overall. specific to your company, even if it's a kind of broader thing. I think that that That definitely Strains.

People's time horizons. But Good leadership is you y you try to get people excited about where you're going. You obviously You you can't just ignore the the short term. There's a a lot of stuff that we need to get done there and At this point, you know it's uh

Pretty big companies. I mean, as one of our our board members says, we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Which is probably a simplification. One of the things that I've sort of personally learned over the last eighteen years of of running the The company.

Is like I remember when I was getting started. Feeling like you Weren't understood. Kinda feels bad. I think that there's there's a normal human impulse which is You want to be understood. I think that that's that's partially why people want to express themselves and why communication is so important. People at some level have this intrinsic

Desire to be kind of understood and belong and Feel like they're And belong with the people around them and Obviously being in a state where you you're kind of

Something that you're trying to do is is kind of fundamentally misunderstood or that people don't believe in it. Can be tough. But After going through a bunch of these cycles I actually feel like I've trained myself

To kind of see it the opposite way. Which is if I'm doing something that feels too well understood for too long. Then I feel like I'm just being complacent. So after having gone through a bunch of these different cycles, whether it's You know, a lot of things that are just not controversial today, but at the time people thought were crazy. Taking the the service initially from being a

A college website to not. Buying Instagram or WhatsApp. Which were you know? billions of dollars for the acquisitions, but like at the time people were like what? You know I r I remember I th I think it was um I don't know if it was John Stewart or or or Colbert, but they did a segment that was making fun of the Instagram acquisition that was like, What? It's like you bought Instagram for a billion dollars?

Of money? Are you kidding? So I I think some of these things it's like you just You kinda go through a bunch of these. And you you Have the conviction to kinda push back on the on the world a little bit and say, Okay, no, we're gonna

get through this and and come out you know eighteen months, twenty four months. With something that we believe in and And after that happens a few times. You kind of understand that that could happen. Most people still will get more of these bets wrong than right. So it's not like Yeah, I I think it's obviously very important to not

Get too overconfident with this. But but at this point I I kinda feel like If people fully feel like they understand what we are as a company and what we're doing. Then I'm not pushing it hard enough. And that actually, now I'm at the point where like that feels bad to me. So I kind of like want to push us into the zone, which is okay. Let's kind of constantly be doing something.

That can be doubted. Because if we're not, then what are we doing? We have this huge opportunity to do exciting things and and help invent things and create things for the world and If it's obvious to everyone that we're kinda gonna be able to do each of the things that we're working on, then I I don't feel like we're we're kinda making the most of what we need to do. So I'm not sure that that that answers the The original question around Internally

Yeah, how do you get people through it? But I actually think A lot of this. How do you get an organization of a hundred thousand people through something? Is about managing your own psychology. And about managing your team psychology.

For sure. You know, one of the things that I that I've always found is You can pretty much, I think, get an organization through And a team through Almost any challenge as long as you can maintain good cohesion.

So It's the external stuff. Th that doesn't bother me that much. I mean it's You know, people can criticize us. I mean I You know, if they're people I respect, I care a lot about that and wanna make sure we do better. But it it doesn't make me not sleep at night. When our stock price goes down, that doesn't make me not sleep at night. When there's a new competitor, that doesn't make me not sleep at night. If there's an issue on my team

And there isn't good cohesion. Then I'm not sleeping well until I resolve that. It goes back to, you know, w the very first thing we were talking about with Fencing it's it's intellectual and you're managing your energy. I I think like in order to get through these things.

And build big long term things. You kinda just need to I I think you need to take care of yourself and you need to take care of your core team, and basically in doing so, you can lead a a pretty large organization through Some pretty difficult times to do some pretty awesome stuff. But I think that it's intellectual, it's energy. And it's about kinda training yourself to be uncomfortable.

So let's talk about the the training yourself to be uncomfortable or to become more comfortable with discomfort. Does anything come to mind just in terms of managing your psychology? For my own psychology, the way that I try to manage this stuff is I wake up in the morning. And you get like whatever emails you have of like stuff that's going on in the world. Right. So it's it's world events, it's team events. Whatever trends we're we're seeing across our our products.

And Often in there there's a fair amount of Bad news. And like new things. That I need to absorb.

And One of the things I found that just just for kind of managing myself Is that If I try to just go straight into the day. Almost every morning when I wake up and like read through my my emails and get the news, it's almost like getting punched with sort of like

A ton of new context and it's like okay, I need to like internalize this. So I found that Doing You just something physical. And and something that's like meditative to take my mind off of it for like an hour. Then I can reset and go do work is really important. So that's why you know things like foiling or surfing.

Have been really imp Because when you're out there in the water, it's like Pretty hard to focus on anything else. When you're on the board, you're focused on making sure you stay on the board and don't mess something up. When you're not, you're

You know, especially if you're if you're kind of towing or something like that, there's not a whole lot of downtime. So I I I've found that from my own performance is significantly better. When I have something like that that's like meditative and physical and and allows me to Kind of output.

Some energy and then I can come back in. And it's almost like I'll have subconsciously settled all the news that have happened in the world. Now it's like okay, now let's go deal with it. Now obviously if if there's something that's really an emergency, I'm not gonna you know go do a sport or something, I'll I'll go deal with it and and obviously part of life is you you don't always get to control your schedule and and that's Kind of how that goes. And when I compare kind of how I do On the days when I kind of get to

have some time to soak that in or to kind of have an outlet versus Just like jumping right in. I I find them often like stewing in bad news or something, and then I just I I'm not as productive. So That's sort of my my own personal way that I that I try to to manage situations like this. But Obviously a key part of this is like having an awesome team and

And it's not it's not, you know, primarily about me at this point. No, it's a big company and We have awesome people who are who are running all these different groups, so I get that the what I'm what I'm saying, kind of how I've worked out the system for myself isn't necessarily something that would work for a lot of other people. I think the the meditative palate cleanser makes sense though. Uh especially if you're talking about things like foiling where the consequence of a lapse of attention on what you're doing has immediate penalties.

So it's you know it's regulating in a sense. Maybe I'm not um strong willed enough or calm enough to just do straight up meditation. It's like I actually need to put myself in a situation Where it's difficult to not focus on that thing. Part of this too. I mean, I do think managing energy is an is an interesting thing. I mean, some of the the the folks who I who I work with at the company

They say this lovingly, but I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron. And that basically They're like you have this unending amount of energy to go work on on something and if you Point that at any given team. You will just burn them.

But at the same time just kinda managing that. So that way I can like manage my own energy and diffuse it w well enough so that way it's like okay, I have the thing that I'm focused on that that day And I it's it's really important to me that I can As often as possible manage my schedule so I can actually Focus on the things that I'm naturally thinking about. I just think the engagement that you get of having like a

an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something than going to getting to go talk to the people who are working on this. is so much better than like going and scheduling a meeting that you'll have three weeks later when I mean maybe the topic will still be important, but it's not like what's going on at that time. So Getting that balance right, I think, is a is an important thing for sustainability for the organization as well. Yeah, for sure. And we may come back to to energy management. We're gonna touch a lot of subjects. We're gonna bounce from the professional

to the personal And everything in between. Let's touch on some things that are kind of top of mind or might be top of mind right now, because I certainly have a lot of questions related to say. The metaverse and a longer term roadmap. And you know, we we chatted briefly.

prior to this about engineering versus science problems. So I think I'd love to unpack that at some point, but let me ask a really specific question. First, and that's related to Kinesthetic feedback and engagement, right? So one thing that struck me about Ready Player One. Especially in the in the cinematic version, so the movie itself, is that you have this incredible tactile environment where they're grabbing objects and interacting with objects, feeling impact and so on.

But then you see them cut to an external shot of someone in a say trailer where they wouldn't actually have that kind of feedback, even though they have haptic suits. In uh Ready player one. What do you see as kind of the roadmap for that type of interactivity? I mean, does it

So I th the more I thought about this uh the the more I realized well surface level stimulation. May not be quite as immersive as people would hope for, do we need to wait for some type of Neuralink type of computer brain interface where we're actually stimulating the brain. And not simulating, but actually producing sort of the perception of

Kinesthetic engagement. How do you think about the future of that type of hardware and interaction. I think that there's a Pretty long arc there. And it's also just pretty amazing how good of a

sense of presence you can you can get. Even with certain things being pretty raw or out of place. Right. The the original Devices that we had for virtual reality. didn't even have hand presence, right? They just had

The headset. And it had this wire, so you you kind of had this wire like wrapped around your neck because it it had to go to a computer to to power the thing. And it just over like every year we basically like knock down one or two more barriers, right? So then we got quest, which you got rid of the wire. You got it so that now you could run virtual reality at you know one fiftieth or one one hundredth of the compute power than what you have in a powerful desktop.

With a mobile chip on your on your headset. Then we got hands. And The first set of hands were basically. Controllers.

But now you're actually getting actual hand tracking with like all ten Yeah, fingers being able to be tracked in real time. You know, in the next version that's coming out, we have Sensors for your eyes you can make realistic eye contact with someone in in virtual reality. And just thinking about

To what extent you can do without some of the stuff. I mean, think about all the Zoom calls that you've been on over the last couple of years during COVID. There's no real eye contact over a video conference. 'Cause your your cameras are in different places. And even without that, you know, it it still gets you pretty far. So in in VR today, adding realistic eye contact, each of these things, it's like You kinda almost don't realize that you're missing them and then when you have them, you're like, Whoa that's like a really core part of the

The human experience is is being able to You know, make eye contact and hold eye contact with someone and like have a gaze. So I think you just you'll you'll just add more things over time, more realistic expressions. more realistic avatars. going from from kind of cartoon and stylistic and fun to photorealistic and having that work.

And then at at some point I think you will get happenings. And you know, the way that we kind of think about You know, haptic glove, for example, you know, screens have resolutions, right? You think about how many pixels are on the screen. And you can actually think about haptics in Your hand or anywhere else. is basically also having a resolution. It's like how many

Pinpoints can it can it make across your Your hand and your hand is super sensitive so it it can actually your your actual A physical hand can have a very high Amount of resolution for haptics, but when we first start getting haptics. They're not gonna have that high of resolution, but it's still gonna be amazing. And then every year they're gonna they're gonna get better and better and better. So I think that there's like

Quite a a far. Roadmap on this, which That's partially what makes it super exciting. Right, it's like you can have a realistically a fifteen year roadmap of like all right, what is it gonna take

the kind of virtual reality presence that you want to be Yeah, feel like you're physically there with another person. At the same time, augmented reality is a whole separate set of problems'cause now you're putting a hologram in the real world. So That's that's kind of uh

A similar thing there. But being able to just work on a project that's like a fifteen year project where There's a lot of it is an engineering problem that you just need to go build. But a lot of it is also unknown, right? So there's like six or seven key unknowns that we just have. multiple teams going out and trying to attack different different approaches at that. I I just think it's a Fascinating and fun way.

To make progress, and of course each year you're intercepting and launching a new product. So I find this to be some of the most exciting work that I've ever gotten to be a part of and I hope that for the rest of my career that I get to engage in more projects that are sort of longer term oriented with this mix of engineering and science and kind of continual milestones. I think it's just a great way to make progress in the world.

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also the recent announcement related to Instagram and NFTs. Just to touch on that, and then we're gonna go back and fill in with some backstory and of some family questions. If you're open to that. As I'm looking at the metaverse and have been you know observing Fairly closely.

web three developments and NFTs and so on in the last handful of years. I've been thinking quite a lot about your long term planning and then How you must think about sort of secondary effects, tertiary effects of These technological advances. And then I've also thought about

I think it was Andy Grove who had paired metrics. So he would have sort of like key like a primary outcome metric that they were tracking and then they would look for kind of correlated impacts that were undesirable or should be addressed in advance. And I'll give you an example. So Playing with Oculus. I was very impressed with the technology because I I used a very early

wanna say prototype, but version years ago. And the advances are are really tremendous. And I had an opportunity to chat with a friend of mine who unbeknownst to me At some point and I'm blanking on the exact game. title, but he was something like second in the world. Or third in the world in mini golf. And

That was I wanna say a year, year and a half ago. Now he's not even in the top. Five hundred. So there's Clearly

A large demand for this, the number of users is increasing rapidly. And it's still early, right? It's really, really Italy. Now when I used the uh technology most recently

And I had several ligaments torn at my knee. So I had the experience of actually engaging with it sitting on a couch, which was fascinating because it was my first time not mapping out Sort of the Playing.

area and walking around. So I actually had the ability to test it as somebody who was sort of mobility restricted, which was amazing. When I came out of the experience, it took a while for my eyes and brain to readjust to sort of the depth perception of objects around me. And I was chatting with his friend John, he said, Oh yeah, you know, it takes about two to three months and then you adjust completely to that. And I'm I'm wondering what types of societal changes, maybe physical adaptations You're tracking

as more and more people come online and begin to spend more and more time using, say, VR. The framework that you're talking about. About having Goals and metrics to track those goals and then countermetrics.

Is I think a really important one that we basically encode into All of our teams across the company. They're basically Things that we're That we think are good. If can enable more connection or or more different things across the company. But then there are kind of countermetrics in all these areas that we're that we're tracking to make sure that

Yeah, we don't exceed or don't increase. Negative effects. For VR specifically, the biggest issue that that people report is still This feeling of motion sickness.

And The basic issue just to to kind of break it down is Your eye. No, eyes are not are not computers, but you can kind of think about it as a refresher route. If something changes in the world, it'll kinda take

Yeah, five to ten milliseconds for different people. For you to sort of recognize that. And if you think about what's technically happening. With VR basically you're you have to render this whole

World continuously. And if a person changes their head. Head position or or eye position and And expects the image to be different. But then by the time that they're

Sakad is done, which is you know w what it's called, but basically your your kind of eye refocusing. If we haven't rendered correctly what you would kind of expect to be in that space. Then it creates this real feeling of discomfort over time. It's not like you miss one frame and you feel terrible for most people, but it's over time if you're not doing that efficiently.

Then that creates this feeling that that it creates a it's a real physical feeling of discomfort. And this is Partially why. The early versions of of the VR headsets. needed to be plugged into a computer because they needed to in order to be able to render a world that quickly

You needed a lot of computing power. So it's this tremendous engineering challenge to now be able to do that so much more efficiently that you're doing that on a mobile chip, which is one fiftieth or one one hundredth is as powerful as the The desktop things, but get that to To work really well. I would say that that

Problem. Is not fully solved yet. It's getting better in every generation. And People aren't computers and not everyone is the same and people have different sensitivity to this stuff. So you know, some people

If a headset is running at sixty frames per second. That won't bother them. But other people, I mean, at the other end of the spectrum, if a headset is running at a hundred twenty frames per second, they may still perceive some glitchiness. And for most people, if you can get to seventy two or ninety, you're in you're in pretty good shape, but there are like outliers and people are not all the same. And you know, at the end of the day, making this a technology that can be comfortable. For basically everyone. Is going to be a really critical part of of making this happen. So that's probably the biggest effect that we see.

Some of the other stuff. Like you mentioned, I I think you just need some more Kind of a longitudinal study. It's tough to To exactly understand.

All the effects of anything right up front. But you wanna be mindful of that and be open to the fact that what you're doing could have issues and that you want to improve those issues and You know, we try to research that stuff and basically try to continuously improve it. But that's the biggest thing that we're tracking right now. And uh on looking at societal changes, we could look at that for a second, then we'll come back to Instagram. Yeah, I've I've been very engaged in watching

Say Axi Infinity as an example and play to earn. In different forms. And it's been pretty mind boggling to see, for instance, that there are so many players in the Philippines. Or earning income that they can now impact Large elections.

Right, as a constituent. And I'm wondering How you see this developing. And this is uh certainly Meta is gonna be a primary player. They're going to be

Other players. But we're If we get to the point where and please poke holes in this if you have a different view of things, but if we get to a point where there's almost a a universal basic income provided by the broad spectrum of jobs that you can have in the metaverse or online.

What do you think some of the societal effects will be of that? It seems to be certainly growing faster than I ever could have imagined, even though a lot of it is maybe not right in my backyard, but it's certainly on a global level. seems to be expanding really quickly. I'd love to hear you speak to that in any capacity. I don't interpret this. As a universal basic income.

I think what we're actually gonna see Is just the creation of a lot of different worlds that have different rules. So I think we'll we'll we'll kind of explore. And and people will get to Spend more time. In worlds that

There are very different rule sets around. Right. Everything from from different physics, literally, to like how you can move through the space. To Different modes of governance. You know one thing that I think is pretty important And that I hope that we can build into

the horizon platform that you know it's it's the social platform that we're building. Is the idea that Anyone can create a space. But then Spaces can be nested in other spaces. So

You can basically Create a Building or store. And then that can be inside a city. That someone else creates. And then there's the question there.

Of Okay, well how do you govern that? Who gets a say in what policies, who can enter it, how do taxes work, like what's the basic business model of that space, what are the design codes around like what are you allowed to build there? All these different dimensions and The physical world is

There's a lot of it, but it is at the end of the day, you know, more finite than what we're gonna have with the virtual world. So not everyone can kind of Get to be the mayor of Of their own virtual space and see how that evolves. But I think part of what we're gonna get to see Is there gonna have a They could be, you know, young people in Philippines or anywhere else, um, around the world experimenting with basically creating

Worlds that are not just a single space or an experience, but actually like an environment or a polity in a way that other people can can kind of be a part of. And I think that there will be Sort of Pretty interesting innovation, you know, social and economic and and governance innovation, as long as this gets designed in a good way. So I guess More than any specific Policy idea.

I think this could end up being a way to Basically explore a lot of different ideas. And kind of see which of these different environments that evolve are going to be appealing to people in different ways. I think that's gonna be Wild to watch play out and and it's one of the things that I'm I'm really looking forward to.

Are there any societal shifts or changes not necessarily catalyzed by meta, but just that you see coming. or plausibly coming that you guys are trying to get ahead of or think about just in terms of mitigating problems later. Is there is there anything that comes to mind? I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're getting at, but one big shift that I think is happening

Is The rise of distributed work. I don't view that as a problem. I think it's good. There's just a lot of research that shows that People's opportunities, social, economic, and otherwise, are Generally pretty anchored to physically where they are.

You know, sometimes people Draw this juxtaposition of Just say, okay, there's like the digital world and the real world. That's not actually how I think about it. I think that there's a physical world and a digital world. And the real world is actually both. And increasingly I think People will use these technologies to be able to

Be present. In places that they physically. And I think that that's really powerful, right? It's like we're doing this podcast and we're not sitting next to each other physically, but it like feels like we're here and we're we're kind of having a a live conversation and in the future, you know, maybe you know five years from now if we were doing this. But they are glasses and

hologram version of me will be on the couch next to you, and I think that that that will be even better than what we're doing right now. So I I think that Yeah, through video chat you can You can have moments where you feel present. But I think through things like virtual and augmented reality, when you Can like have an office and someone can be walking through it as a hologram, even though they're physically in a different place.

I think that you'll just be able to Much more naturally unlock. more of the opportunities, both social and economic, and and I guess other others as well. Of being able to be around people and be present no matter where you actually are. So people will be free to To kinda live where they want, maybe where their family physically.

in a country that they grew up in, but they'll have all the opportunities that will be available around the world. So that I think is Is awesome. I think it's one of the most promising Things about the future. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is sort of taking the conversation in a different direction is

We actually recently did this exercise at our company. Where we were thinking about okay, we're coming up on Almost a hundred thousand people soon in our company. And We kind of think about our values as a company as like our cultural operating system. How do we get work done well?

And continue to build the things that we need to build and You know, a big part of the the values and I'd love to podcast or or any public thing that I've done where I've discussed any of the values. I think it probably be pretty interesting to to go through it.

We rolled out this value called live in the future, which is basically about the world is moving towards being distributed first. Both because we think that that's a good trend for how we work. And because we

aspire to play a role in building all the technology to enable that through virtual reality, augmented reality. Metaverse software. And infrastructure and like avatars to express yourself. We have the same that we want people inside the company to eat your own dog food. They use the things that we're building internally. as part of how we work because that's also it gets us in a faster feedback loop to make those tools better for for everyone else around the world. But I mean that's one of the the six values that we just rolled out. I actually think might be interesting to go through the others too, but up to you.

Yeah, please. Please let's go through them and then I'll I'll have some questions about them, I'm sure. Yeah, some of them we kept, but we're just changing How we execute them. So

One thing that I think our company's pretty well known for Is having the value of move fast. I've always basically believed that values are only useful if you can Legitimately disagree with them. Oh, it's not like values like be honest. Are not that helpful because like of course you have to be honest, right? It's like I I feel bad even needing to write that down. If you have to write that down, then something kind of went wrong. But I don't know any good company that doesn't focus on honesty or demand that of their employees.

So from my perspective, that's not like a useful If you only get to write down like five or six concepts to program into your culture You want them to be things that Good companies can reasonably do differently. And I think part of this is that

Good values you need to be able to give something up in order to get them. So Around move fast. We've always had this. Question is like you can't just tell people to move fast. The question is like, what's the deal? Like, what are you what are you willing to give up? And famously w it used to be move fast and break things.

And the the idea of the Was that we tolerated some amount of bugs in the software in order to be encouraged people to move quickly. Cause moving fast, I think is the key to learning. So if you wanna increase the iteration cycle. that way you can get feedback from the people you serve quickly. And then incorporate that into the product. So we would literally get into situations

Where competitors of us would ship. Once a year, once every six months, and we'd ship code every day. Of course we're gonna learn faster and we're gonna build something better if you're shipping something every day. So the question is, what are you willing to give up? So it used to be We would tolerate some amount of defects in the product.

It got to the point is the as the company grew. We were producing so many bugs that going back and fixing them was actually slowing us down more than than we were speeding up. So I still thought okay, like moving fast, this is still like a really important thing. We've gotta change how we do it. So We kind of evolved.

To Building a somewhat less sexy phrase, move fast with stable infrastructure. And the basically the new bet was we're going to invest disproportionately in building up. Good infrastructure. And abstractions inside our company, so that way the average engineer who comes here is gonna be much faster and more productive at getting things done than in other places. Yeah.

At a scale of almost a hundred thousand people. What this really means now Companies just add process over time. And it's all good intention, right? It's like people are trying to Make sure that we don't repeat mistakes that we've made. So you just have this like checklist of things that everyone needs to do before they can ship anything. But

Most companies don't have a counter process to that. To basically garbage collect and remove Processes that are no longer that useful. What I'm really focused on now Is just methodically going through and making sure all of the different processes that we've built up as a company still serve us well and and kind of empowering.

An effort to go do that. So now that's that's kind of what Move Fast is focused on. Should we keep going? All right. So The second one is it's focus on long term impact. Where on the one hand you want a very fast cycle time to learn quickly. But on the other hand. You want to always keep people focused on the prize and long term.

You know one thing that's sort of Unfortunate we had a version of this before that we just said focus on impact. But A lot of people, especially as the company grew, interpreted that to mean Do something that would make an impact in this six month cycle.

Right. So that way, like when you have your performance review, your manager can point to something good that you did and you get promoted. And it's like, oh God, that's like definitely not what we're trying to do. Obviously, it's good if you can have an impact in the near term, but you want to be able to kind of have a faster duration speed to learn quickly. Point. It's not always important to deliver something every six months. You want to make sure that you're focusing and improving things for the long term. So we've actually made a bunch of changes to our culture. We changed performance management and the performance cycle that people have. From every six months to now it's just once a year to make it set the time frames that people have are longer. The next one is a new one that we added.

We call build awesome things. And the idea here is that I actually think that there's a pretty big difference between Things that are valuable. And things that are

Awe inspiring and and amazing. And I kinda think that our company Has been Pretty good.

At building things that a lot of people use and like But For a combination of reasons, we just haven't focused. quite as much until the last few years, especially as we've worked on a lot of this metaverse. Work.

In virtual reality and and things like that. We haven't focused as much on things that are just awe inspiring. And I actually think there's this balance where you need to do both. You can't do things that are just all inspiration and no substance. But I also think you can go too far in the other direction.

Of just doing things that are useful. Much. I think a lot of what the world needs right now is inspiration. There are a lot of things in our lives in modern day that Work pretty well, but

A lot of what we sort of lack is a positive vision for the future. A lot of the metaverse work. to me has that level of inspiration. And that's partially why I find it super exciting. We talked about live in the future. That's mostly focused on Being A great distributed workforce from the early days of Covid, I guess sort of

tried to put a flag in the ground that we were gonna Even after Covid is done, I think By the end of this decade hopefully have fifty percent or more of the company working distributed and working remotely, and I still think that that will be awesome and just unlock opportunity, get access to more talent. And then the last two be direct and respect your colleagues, which I find as the company grows

One of my colleagues, Boz, has this saying that we're in danger of nicing ourselves to death. I think like as organizations grow there's a sort of politeness that comes in where when you're just working with a small set of people And you're comfortable with them. You can actually be a lot more blunt and direct and Cheryl always says that the the amount of progress that we make is directly proportional to the number of hard conversations that we're willing to have. As companies grow, I think like it's tougher to give hard feedback. So trying to build that into the cultural operating system, which is like we're just gonna really reward and focus on being direct.

with each other, I think is a really important thing. And then the last one, you know, I realize I've probably been talking for like ten minutes straight at this point, but but I I think this is this is the first time I've talked about this stuff publicly. So I you know I have a lot a lot a lot of goods to say. When we rebranded the company to meta. We have this internal question of which we call our employees. And someone actually Email Douglas Hofsteder, right, the renowned author and thinker.

He wrote back and was like it should be Meta Mates and Internally, I felt like if Douglas Hofstedder thinks we should be Meta Mates, then um then who am I to disagree with that? So um our our last value is um Meta Meta Mates Me, which is it's sort of this adaptation from this old naval saying ship shipmate self. As the company grows, you want to make sure that the people stay focused on the long term and the whole enterprise. And then their their teams But then and also take care of themselves. I think that that's like

Sort of having that as a framework is pretty important. So I'm happy to go into more detail on any of these, but I also want to be aware that I this is uh quite a long uh answer and and monologue as it is. So so wherever you want to go with this. Yeah, let's pick up on it and then I have a whole bunch of other things I'd love to get into. But with respect to the values, so And I've seen and looked very closely at the values of, say, Amazon, which you have iterated that Bezos put together, and others, and I think the degree to which values end up the

For lack of a better term, sort of operating system. of people at a company varies widely, company to company. And I'd love to know. How or if you are and you mentioned one example of the longer performance review

Time frames. Yeah. Right. Incentivizing these behaviors? Do you have a team that is sort of determining How to Facilitate Supporting

these values throughout the organization. So that they're They do have more Saturation, so to speak. Each of these is basically coupled with an operational effort we have a

a set of of work that we do. That's It's like move fast is is the work and it's basically It's actually something that I'm pretty engaged in. Where I will just routinely go and sit down with

Largely engineering leaders, but also folks across the company. And ask them, Okay, well what is slowing you down, right? So in addition to the product reviews that I'll do where we'll talk about What are the decisions we should be making, or you know, what should we be investing in? I think it's useful to often just sit down with people and and have a whole conversation. They're like, all right. What are the things that are that are basically causing you To move more slowly.

And then I view a bunch of my job. As CEO, but then also we we have other people who just work on this. To try to go remove those obstacles. And obviously we have to do it in a way that helps fit the other goals of the company. You know, if people are saying, hey, It would make me

Didn't have to care about this issue. You know, if that's an important issue, then you know, obviously we're not gonna Just say no, right? It's like let's let's figure out how we can care about that issue and do this as efficiently as possible. You can apply energy methodically over a long period of time.

Towards. Boiling or greasing the the wheels in the in the organization. In the direction that you want, and I I think you can get it done over time. I remember when I was first Learning.

About running an organization. I Had this conversation with this guy, Dan Rosenswig, who's the COO of Yahoo at the time. And he's great. He's he's a is a great person. And he he told me this thing that will always stick with me, which is that

Every organization sucks. But you get to choose the ways in which your organization sucks. And and which is may maybe the most negative possible way of putting it. But but I think it's it's basically if you want to move fast on certain dimensions, you can But you only get a few things like that. If you want to optimize moving fast, we can do that. If we want to optimize being distributed first, we can do that. But maybe you get like five of these. And and we are very focused on operationalizing them and and making sure that each of these values is backed up. By like real work streams that we have or decisions that we make or processes that we make. I mean I mentioned changing the performance management tool for live in the future, one of the big things that we're doing is

And I don't just want And working over video conference, I also want them to be using workrooms and using their VR headsets to workrooms is this product, it's it's the VR product. That we built for collaboration and it's great. It's early still, but it's fascinating. It's it's like you can You're in a meeting and you're sitting around a table and even though

The Fidelity isn't quite as photorealistic on the avatars yet as Just say the conversation that we're having now. The fact that you can sit around a table and you can see people's Gestures and

You know, you can have a side conversation. So if there's ten people around the table, you can turn to the person next to them and ask them a question. There can be multiple conversations going on in the room, like a normal room, but obviously you can't do anything like that over a video conference. There are a bunch of things like that that actually make it In some ways feel more real already. Than video conferences, even though the avatars are still very stylized and cartoony. So but we basically have a rule. That everyone who's in leadership or management should be

basically doing w at least like one standing meeting a week in workrooms. We want to get the feedback loop going on that. That that team now is overwhelmed with feedback on on how to on how to get it to be even better. But but I think the one of the outcomes of this is like I think Workrooms is gonna probably learn what they need to do to be a great product a lot faster than than a lot of others in the space. So that's kind of one way to to operationalize these. But yeah, you you gotta operationalize them if you want them to be real. Otherwise they're just words that you put on a website somewhere. I wanna say that One thing that came up repeatedly in the course of doing homework for this conversation was how relentlessly product focused you are. And I heard multiple anecdotes. I don't know if they're apocryphal.

Well, I can imagine them happening, though, where if you know you'd be walking down the street and some kid would be like Facebook sucks and you'd walk over and be like, Oh yeah? Well tell me like show me why it sucks. Like show me and then you'd take like twenty five notes and the next day team would get A long list of things from having actually sat down with someone for like a half hour, forty five minutes, and having them walk you through their experience and I d I do think that's true. Yeah. So I'd love to ask a a few more questions about

Just web three in general. And then maybe back step for a second to ask you about Yeah. With Instagram and NFTs, so I know there th the web three is getting a lot of airtime right now. And I just came from a separate conference where like every conversation involved Web3. And it strikes me that

Web two, web three. decentralized, centralized are going to coexist. I mean, I'm no expert, but it seems that people want curation. In many cases, they want trusted third parties. I don't want to always be my own bank. It's there's there are good reasons why I use banks instead of not taking on all those responsibilities myself. And I'm wondering how let's just say in the case of Instagram, Some challenges that perhaps you foresee. And I can imagine, for instance, if people can turn hypothetically posts into NFTs.

How that might affect Let's just say Content moderation. and a safety precautions and so on if they actually have ownership Of

their posts, right? So the I mean this is a hypothetical that I'm just kind of throwing out there, but what type of challenges do you foresee? coming up in the near term or in the long term. The one that you just mentioned is is I think a really fundamental one. I mean at some level. You can

Make things censorship resistant, which has a bunch of equities, and there're certainly a lot of people who feel like their expression is restricted online more than they would like. But That also prevents If if you really can't stop people from expressing things, then

How are you going to fight against terrorism or child exploitation or things that people think are like really Awful. Even the people who generally want more stuff to be allowed online. So really removing the ability For any one. To do any kind of moderation at all.

In a broader platform, I think is problematic. I think in in something like Messaging, you know, we don't expect know the people who run our messaging platforms, you know, whether it's us or Apple or whoever to go kind of moderate a message that you send in private. But it's it it's it's sort of this distinction between the living room and the town square. Right. If you're in in a space That's a broader space. Then I think that there there is a little more need to make sure that

Things conform to the values that society wants, right, and producing Things that are just really That I think everyone agrees are bad. Like terrorism and and child exploitation and Bullying and things like that.

Taking a step back on your question. around web three and NFTs. I come at a lot of this From the perspective of Thinking about the metaverse and How to make it more interoperable and a better environment for creators.

And do you think that there's there's an interesting conversation to have around Instagram and and Facebook and What to do there, but I kind of I tend to think about that. As sort of How can you help bootstrap a creative economy in these

Two D social apps. that will be much, much bigger once you get to the this metaverse vision over time. I think the reason why interoperability is so important Is because Imagine this case.

And we get to a point where instead of spending three hours a day on video conference calls You're now spending At the same time. in basically feeling like you're actually present with someone either because they're a hologram on your couch with augmented reality, or you're in virtual reality in something like workrooms, but but a future version of it where you're like actually You feel like you're physically there with them around a table.

Okay, so Now in a world where you're spending a few hours a day doing that. You're gonna care about how you express yourself. Both the avatar, right, do you show up as a photorealistic version of yourself? Are you a dragon? Are you kind of a stylized version, but a lot of this is gonna be like okay. How do we choose to express ourselves is through the clothing and what we wear and what we put on. But now imagine Daddy.

Every app that you go to Anything that you do to express yourself, you so you get a sweatshirt, it's in an app. You can't actually bring that to another app. That would just be. massively stifling for the whole creative economy because now as a consumer, you're not gonna want to buy a lot of

sweatshirts because they're not gonna be that useful'cause you can't bring them between places. And because you're not gonna wanna By that much. It's gonna be less useful for creators and fewer people are going to be able to make A living basically designing these kind of experiences or virtual architecture, virtual clothes, or or different things like that. So The ability to be able to

Take how you want to express yourself and take your stuff with you. Between these different experiences I think it's just like a really key Technical principle and standards.

So I hope we can get there. And in order to push in that direction, I think it's helpful to start sooner. In things like Instagram and Facebook by supporting the communities that are doing things like NFTs. So that way you can get to minting, you can get to bringing your stuff around between these different places.

But I do think that the the challenges that you're mentioning where All systems I think end up being some combination of some element of decentralized and And centralised. I think actually a lot of new systems just create value by decentralizing and creating more opportunity in some area by creating a new tool that a lot of people use. But

I think we'll need to get the balance right. And that's something that I'm probably more optimistic about the web three stuff than most other people who are running these big companies. So I'm trying to push us to be more forward leaning on that. Our kind of fundamental belief is that if we

Create more use cases. Where creators can start to do this stuff. Then You'll get more experimentation and you'll also just get a bigger creative economy over time, which I think is a huge part of the goal. It's gonna be exciting to watch. I have to say also that Doing a bit of

biographical research, looking at your trajectory, having known quite a bit already. It's Incredible to me. how much complexity you have learned to grapple with in the sense that now on a global stage, if there are

conflicts or state actors who want to engage or need to engage, you know, meta is almost Always it would seem going to be on the playing field in s in some capacity. And it's just very impressive to me that you have From the very beginning. reached this point where you're grappling with so many different layers of complexity. So I I just wanted to say that first and foremost.

It's I don't I can't even imagine. Uh I I I honestly can't even imagine. I have enough trouble dealing with the complexity of a tiny team of fewer than ten people. Much less a hundred thousand and then uh the the global stage. One thing I did want to ask about I had uh Noah Feldman on this podcast a long time ago. You put a lot of time and thought into the oversight board. What is your assessment of how that's going? Well I think it's early. One of the things that that I think has been really promising. Is that

Society needs A network of different institutions. that it feels like are legitimate or have some legitimacy for making decisions. In order to basically accept the decisions and feel like they're fair. And I think one basic issue that we've found ourselves in

Is that there's just no way that any single private company Should be responsible for arbitrating So many questions of social values, right? Between you know free expression and safety, or locking things down to ensure privacy versus making sure that the marketplace can be open and competitive, right? It's like these these are real issues and there's equities on all sides. And

There's no single decision that any company can make on But any of them that I think is going to be universally accepted. So I think therefore You really want to Not set up a situation.

Where One company is kind of has to make a lot of these decisions by themselves. That that's why I wanted to create this oversight board. I I recognize that we're always going to have to be kind of the first line and we're gonna be responsible for making

The moderation decisions on our platform. I kinda thought it was important that we shouldn't have the final say in the most important decisions. And that there was a different body. The judicial analogy is something like a Supreme Court, although obviously, you know, there there are all these differences here. But Something that people can appeal to.

And that we can also refer some of the most complicated cases to And that they can make the final and binding judgment on that. And One of the things that we've seen that I think has been interesting. Is that

It does seem like there's a little bit more Acceptance. When the oversight board weighs on something complicated. Than when we just do it ourselves. And I think part of that was we put a

Lot of thought into. Yeah, making sure that the people who who are on the oversight board You are world renowned in terms of a focus on human rights, really focused on on free expression as well, because At the end of the day, these platforms are about giving people a voice. Diverse, spanning a large portion of the globe. You know, legitimacy isn't like a binary thing. It's not like either it's completely rejected or it's completely accepted by everyone.

We were mindful in setting this up and I I I think the oversight board has also done A good job itself in in kind of managing It's independents. It is a completely independent organization from us and And it has to be. And its independence is super important for it it's continued.

Legitimacy. O overall I'd say I'm I'm sort of optimistic about how it's going, but I think Building that sort of trust and legitimacy also takes time. It's not like a thing that That you can just turn on in a year and then all of a sudden people will think, Okay, this thing exists, great. It's it's gonna be making decisions. It often overruling us or rebuking us on things and people seeing that we respect its independents and its authority and going and implementing that. That's I think how it how it basically builds legitimacy over time. But I think

As an institution. I think it's it's really important that we have this kind of independent function. Of course, over time. You know, having clear rules set in in kind of democratically elected Congress. would be I think the most useful thing.

And w we're getting that more or less in different parts of the world. Obviously it's it's a little harder in the in the United States because I think the the First Amendment is great. I'm obviously hugely supportive of the First Amendment, but I think that makes it harder for anyone in in the United States to creator craft different regulations that weigh in on some of these. Trade offs.

But I do think over time there there will be a a balance that is struck across all of this and Like that this is all part of that moving towards that equilibrium. You mentioned Cheryl earlier. I'd like to come back to Cheryl. So this is a question from a female friend of mine. I'll just read it kind of as it's as it's written and I'd love to hear your thoughts. So Mark's business partnership with Cheryl is legendary. I can't off the top of my head think of another partnership like this. Male female lasted fifteen or so years, fifteen plus, still going. Why does it work? How does it work?

Why does he think so? Very few others have such a partnership. I'll just add one more. You know, what has shifted in his life and business as a result. So I'd just love to hear any any thoughts on that because it does strike me also as a very Unusual. Partnership that has been

That has proven itself with in tremendous longevity. that partnership has defined the growth of the company. I and and so first of all, I I would give a huge amount of the credit For this working to share all. I think she is an amazing person, and if you think about When she joined the company

Yeah, I was like a kid. She was actually as old as I am now. This fifteen years ago. And you know, I was in my early twenties and and didn't know anything about business or running a company or anything like this and And I just think the extraordinary amount of patience that she had and I mean in in a way is like

As a Manager of an organization it's almost like she raised me like a child. And not just me, I think like a lot of the The people we have on the on the team now. So I think she's she's exceptional in in that way.

One thing that's interesting about our company Is that The business Is sort of oddly Divorced from the actual product.

Most things it's like okay, you build a product and you sell the product. And in our case, I think one of the things that created enough space for someone Who has As much energy and Is as senior as Cheryl to to join is the fact that in the type of business that we have.

The consumer part of what we do. Is actually somewhat distinct from the advertising and the business part of what we do. So there was enough space, I think, in the company to have Two people who basically were like primary Principles for the company and I've debated this with a bunch of other

Companies. We had a great podcast with Daniel Eck a while ago towards the beginning of Covet, and I I've had this discussion with him a bunch of times. I was like, Well He's like, I just couldn't do that. Because it's like literally for for Spotify, it's like they build the the business and the content and all that stuff is like one kind of package. Whereas I think we're sort of uniquely set up where we can I can focus on the the consumer part of what we do, and she can focus on all the advertising and building the business. And that just has worked incredibly well over over a long period of time and I think will for a long time to come. So

Just have a huge amount to learn from her. And I think she probably feels I guess she feels the same way, but you'd have to ask her. Yeah, maybe that'll be round two. So I do think the the you know the separation of church and state, I mean that's probably an overstatement, but the the clearly delineated halves of the company, so to speak. lend themselves to that. It's a really good point. What are her

Superpowers. I know that may be a strange word to use, but I think of say Warren Buffett referring to Charlie Munger and saying he has the best sixty second mind on the planet. And they have very complimentary skill sets, slightly different views of the world though though. highly compatible values. What are Cheryl's Superpowers that come to mind.

If any. Well, I think she has a very good combination. Of IQ and EQ. People either I think tend to be more manager or more strategic. And I think she is

Very unique and Being both and I just think that that's pretty rare. Obviously if you get someone who's great at strategy or great at products and they're not a great Manager, that's great. If you can have someone who's excellent at one of those things, you hire them every day. I think it's just exceptionally rare to find people who have who are kind of

Spike in both of those areas. But She actually uses a lot of dating analogies, I don't. But in terms of this one I was talking to a friend who was single recently and we were talking about why she was single and I do just think like some people want to go through life with partnerships more than others.

I think that there are some people who like They want a co founder, they want a partner who they can run the thing with and who can kind of have they can have that experience with on a day to day basis. And then there are other people who are just like, Okay I'll just have a team of you know five or six people around me and like I'll be the the leader or the founder, but I don't need like a another person and I just that's different. Partnership has always meant a lot to me.

Both in my personal life and and in work. I like want people to be on the voyage with me. This isn't like a solo story. That's like a lot of how I derive meaning. And in life, and Again, you'd have to ask her whether she Maybe she's oriented in a in a similar way. But I think to some degree

I think whether partnerships work over time, probably the number one factor in that is whether you want the partnership to work. Yes, for sure. Or if out of the box, in a sense, you are predisposed to partnership. Right. Well let's actually use this as a as a

as a way to move to uh question or just I mean observation and then a question that I'd love to ask. And we can take it any direction you'd like to. So th this is from a mutual friend who who said one thing that most people don't know is that his mom is an M D, but she stayed home and never practiced medicine. She worked at the front desk of his dad's orthodontic business, which was under their home. And she was wondering, you know, how these family dynamics have

shaped who you are today and how you Parent your own children. That's a big question that could go a lot of directions, I I recognize, but I'd love to hear you That story is partially true. My mom and and dad are both doctors and my mom did practice for a bit, but it is true that when Randy, my older sister was born, I guess my mom was having a hard time finding

Child care and people who she trusted enough to raise the kids, so she decided That she wanted to spend more time with us. But my dad's dental office was attached to the house, like you said, so it's just this like Magical thing. Well I mean, my parents both worked super hard growing up and were great role models in that way.

But also like when I got home from school, I could just like throw my backpack on the couch and run downstairs and go see them and then my dad was like drilling someone's tooth and like that person was probably not that happy that I came in and was like But Plenty of stories there. And they were great parents for us growing up. They really prioritized family, which is something That

I definitely took from them. And I think not only did I take it from them. For myself. But it was really meaningful for me. And

basically who I look for as a partner. And Priscilla, I think, is really focused on this and she obviously has an amazing career and has way more jobs than I do in addition to being a parent. But the family orientation is a really big deal. My parents always pushed for They cared that we were That we like achieved and did great.

In school. But beyond that they Didn't really care what specific thing we were interested in. They just wanted to expose us to a bunch of things and then If we were interested in something

Then they would try to kinda push us to become excellent at that thing. My mom was never like You should go fence. She was just like, you know, sports are good. Go find some some sport. Let's get good at that. I have three sisters and they're all Excellent at very different things.

Quite musical. But that's most expressed through Randy, who is just an excellent musician. You can kind of uh go go through go through the different siblings. I I guess I got computers. And it's Seems to have worked out for you. Yeah, I I I think so. I'd say Donna's like the intellectual one. And L has always been the the kind of most well rounded and social and athletic of us, which is you know, as as I've grown up and I've I've kind of gotten even more into sports, it's

Just it's been really fun just getting to See how much better she is at me at like skiing and all these things that that we we kinda grew up together doing. But no, I I I think like that's that's sort of how I hope to raise Our kids is I care a lot that they're gonna be good at school. But I also care that they can get

exposed to a lot of different things and and kinda choose the things that they want to do. It's a fun adventure. One of the things in terms of my parenting is I I try to No matter what is going on in the day. I always do bedtime with them.

I mean I guess every once in a while I have to travel, although with Covid it's been nice. I haven't had to travel that much. So that's um maybe one silver lining of the of the pandemic the last couple of years, but it's Yeah, I I just take an hour every day. We read, we like Sing we know it's um I'm reading this book with them now, The Way of the Warrior Kid.

Which is is is good. I recommend this. Um it's it's Is this Jocko? It is. This is Jako willing. Look at that. That's great. He so Jocko's first ever long form public interview is on this podcast. Okay, there you go. And yeah, so I know Jocko very well. So this book was

Recommended to me by Toby Ludke, the founder and CEO of of Shopify. And the girls love it. And now they've started training jujitsu and and they're like so this is the stuff, you know, takes on a life of its own. It's super fun. Yeah, having stuff that we do that we do together every day. And then I I always Wrap up the day with um We have this routine. That Max calls the goodnight things.

Which is basically every night we go through. I'm like, all right, what are the things that are most important in life? And they're Health. Loving family and friends and something you're excited about. In like what did you do to help someone today?

And we basically go through each of these things. And it's like all right, so health. It's like well, what did you do to like make yourself stronger or more fit today? If you get hurt. Max broke her leg skiing once. Let's go through the parts of your body that like still work and that you're gonna like be able to use while you're recovering.

And it's like okay, loving family and friends. Let's go through you know something that you did today with a person who is meaningful to you. And then I think something you're excited about is And this is actually this is like my philosophy on life. I'm just trying to like boil it down for them. I guess the the adult version of this is I think You have to have something that you're looking forward to for the future. I think that that's just a really important part of keeping people Going.

With the weight of life. But For kids, you know, it tends to be something that they're excited about tomorrow. More often than not, it's just like, All right, I'm excited to see mom in the morning, or like I get to eat Cheerios at breakfast. It's like okay. It's not not super inspiring, but um but it's the right the right basic idea. But and then every once in a while it's something like okay, Max is like, I'm gonna get ski poles next week and it's like okay, that's like a big milestone, right? Or it's like I'm gonna lose my first tooth, right? Or like I can't wait until I can like have do jujitsu again. And then the the last one I think is probably the most important, which is And I think especially for our family.

Especially for for these. girls who are obviously growing up and Very wealthy family. It's like You're gonna do something nice to help someone every day. This is just like an important service orientation that I think That I I just want.

our family to have and We just all go around and like I tell them something nice that that I tried to do to to help someone and and they have to uh tell me something nice that they did to To help someone. And it could just be like a Another kid at school or it could be Mom

Or um cousin or something like that. But Probably much to their chagrin, I don't let them go to sleep until they can tell me something that nice that they did to to help someone that day. So that's probably like the best encapsulation of my How I think about parenting and the values that I wanna try to impart to them. Thank you for sharing all of that. I want to say a few things. Number one

Toby, one of my favorite people. I've known Toby since two thousand eight or so. And people might be wondering why am I asking about family? Why am I asking about parenting and Part of the reason I'm asking is because many people who listen to this podcast listen to model. They listen to model people and I think it's very important to get a holistic picture. Of how people

think about and prioritize things in their lives and manage things in their lives because you can end up If you're not careful, say in the realm of business, modeling someone who is from an external perspective, very financially successful, but they're family lives, their relationships are in shambles. Yeah. So I I do think that the Micro can

be a reflection of the macro, which is why I like to explore these things. So on the point of Things that are important in life. Man, I I love that you're reading Jako's book to your kids. It's fantastic. Do not well, actually no, someday you should roll with Jako. He is a black belt jujitsu and Is an absolute Killer. So probably above your weight class, but worth rolling with nonetheless.

Speaking of things that are important in life. I would love to ask you about And this is gonna be uh interesting transition. The sacred and then the secular. And for the secular, I have a I have a very specific kind of I'd love to ask you what role

religion. Please. in your life. If any. How do you think about that?

It's actually I I think playing in increasing role in in recent years. And so I mean I I was raised Jewish. And I think four. From the time I went to college or so, maybe I I wasn't as focused on it.

But I think a few things in the last five or six years have made me A little more focused on it. One is of course family and having kids. You like wanna have traditions for For the kids. And

A lot of the time it's like okay, well, here are the things that I did when I was growing up. And the that I thought were meaningful, and the ones that are good, you want to do, and the ones that that aren't. You don't. But I just found having that Community and values grounding. was really valuable. So so we are raising our Girls.

To be Jewish and that's that's just become a a more important part of our So it's like every Friday Pretty much no matter what's going on, we do Shabbat dinner. Priscilla actually loves this. I mean she's

Basically, but s from Yeah, I think about Tuesday or Wednesday. She starts carving out like an hour or so of the day to like start cooking the Shabbat dinner and basically we have a bunch of friends over and it's just like a real center point of the week. That element I think is more cultural. Then there's I I'd say for for me personally and for our company

probably for a lot of people around the world. I mean the last five or six years have been pretty tough. You know, if you just look at kind of how people felt about our company You know, before twenty sixteen If you look at like s average sentiment around the company, it's like there was almost like never a month when the sentiment was negative. And since twenty sixteen, there's Almost never been a month where the net sentiment has been positive.

There have been so many social issues that have been kind of brought to the forefront. that and we talked about this a little bit before in terms of the oversight board and how it's important that it's not just like One person or one company making all these Decisions trying to balance these complex social equities, but There just need to be things that are

Bigger than you. In your life. So Even though our country has a lot of struggles, I probably believe more in democracy now than I

What if I probably hadn't even you know didn't think about it that deeply before, but I I just think like you know, believing in kind of democracy in our institutions is like sort of a a bigger s force than any individual. I think it's sort of a grounding thing. But I think similarly believing that there are things that are bigger than that, like God, I think are also

is also just sort of a really grounding thing for me. So The more you sort of study the Bible or the Torah or whatever. I mean there's there is like just a lot of wisdom in it. In in terms of Yeah how the Live your life, how to think about creation and building. I mean, no matter what you're doing, no matter how kind of modern or technological it is.

I just think that there are interesting Lessons. It's like at the beginning of the Torah and Genesis. Most of like the

The Bible's basically rules for how to live your life and But it starts with it's like why does it start in this place of Of talking about the creation. Starts off with like okay, God created people in In God's image. And it's like, Well what does that mean? What what does that mean you're supposed to go do?

But it starts off talking about creation. Oh God create all the stuff. It's like yeah. I I think that there's like a a real interpretation in that that Is Kinda personal to me, which is

A lot of what we're doing. We are here to do is create good things in the world. And I think that that's like very intrinsic to When I'm having a bad day or I just think like the there's something that's sort of

grounded in No, this is like what I think a big part of what we were here to do. Build things that make the world better. And I think that that is like a fundamental thing, that is is sort of ancient wisdom.

As people face challenges in their lives and As you think about the next generation, I think that these are both Things that tend to ground you and tie you to much longer arcs and traditions, and that's certainly been the case in my life. You know, I've I've actually gone to a number of uh Shabbat dinners here in Austin with friends of mine, and it's made me feel like I have perhaps a a ritual deficiency. It's such an incredibly grounding

Nourishing. tradition, I mean uh outside of the religious context. And it also what you're saying reminds me, I'm blanking on the book. I think it's four thousand weeks, but That's by Oliver Berkman and there's a chapter called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. Just the relief that one can feel when their time horizon, what they're considering

sort of spans outside of themselves and is to understand that there are things that are bigger than you, but what you do still matters. So I I you know I'm gonna get to the secular question and I know we're running up on time shortly. But in the two thousand ten New Yorker profile, which can't believe everything you read, so we'll see where we go. But Among interests.

That were cited. Here one was eliminating desire. Do you recall having this in your interests and I'm curious about this though because It it's very emo. That was the marketing offense. All right. We can we can chalk that up to emo. So emo emo period check explain.

I'm gonna get to the technical question before I get to that though. You did personal challenges. Yeah. Annually for about ten years. Which challenge

ended up being much easier than expected and which one ended up being much harder than expected. Either or. Just be curious to know. I still do stuff like this. I don't make as big of a deal of it anymore. But I I think just kind of throwing yourself into different situations to learn

New things is I think that that's just a big part of life, so Well which one's very hard? One, I tried to meet a new person every day for the year. That was hard. For me.

I'm pretty introverted. I built some Amazing. relationships out of it. I you know, I started Teaching this class at the local boys and girls club with a friend and like mentored the kids for

Just talk to them a couple weeks ago. They're they were all like none of their families had gone to college before, and now they're all graduating college. It's pretty cool. It's amazing. But it's um I'm super introverted. So I think that that's probably been another silver lining of the whole distributed work thing for me. Is um having space to to kinda think and and kind of control my my time and like not not get interrupted by other people so much. But

No, it is an interesting balance being introverted, but also being pretty sensitive and caring a lot about other people. I think that the people kind of think that that introverts are like Don't like other people or something, that's not true. I just She get overwhelmed easily. The th the interesting thing is they all went in weird directions. One year

It did this like year of running. I just Did all kinds of different running. I did like Sprints, I did long distance running, and then like my knees started hurting, so then I run down and did triathlons and We were training for this Iron Man, but then I like

I broke my arm biking. So that that ended up not not quite happening. So I mean they all kinda go in in different directions. I learned Mandarin one year. Learned Mandarin. You can't learn Mandarin in a year. I I I I ended up studying it for I mean, maybe someone can. I cannot. Um you know we talked about my language deficiency earlier on. I mean that was partially I like I like kinda throwing myself into things that They're hard and you know, like I said before, I mean I've Studied a lot of languages in my life. A little Spanish, a little

French, a little Hebrew. A lot of Latin, a bunch of Greek. But it's actually hard for me. So I kind of I kinda like doing things that are hard for me. And obviously Mandarin is is important'cause Brazil's family is Chinese. So Priscilla and I after dating for almost ten years had

We decided we didn't want to have like a big wedding that a lot of people We didn't want a lot of people asking us about it for a while, so we did it as a surprise wedding and basically Didn't tell anyone. And then the morning of the wedding. We're kind of telling everyone and I I told Priscilla's mother

And Mandarin. And I never knew before that if she understood anything I was saying. And I just told her and a single tear went down her face. And I was like Okay, my Mandarin is at least good enough for that. So A lot of them are have a physical element, just because I

I tend to think like people focus so much on Thought process, decision making, like how can be as smart as possible, but Yeah, I just think like energy level and There hasn't been that much that's been written about historical figures and energy level as opposed to how they thought. But I I actually would be very fascinated about

Yeah, I mean learning how to foil surf and things like that. It's just I mean, it's super humbling. I mean these are like really hard Skills. It takes like weeks before you can even like get going. And it's um And I'm such a beginner. But it's it's just wild and it's so much fun and you know, it's like you start off doing

This like downwinding thing. I mean the the the the awesome thing about the foil is like there's almost no friction compared to a surfboard, right? A surfboard you need to like be in a big wave or else like it you just stop. But a foil, you're just You're you're kinda standing on the board, but you're actually riding this little wing and it has no friction, so you can kinda just Or very little friction. So You can basically just ride it on open ocean swells and

It's this great workout. You just like And Yeah, you're heart rate gets up to like one sixty, but you're but you can go for like a mile or or more and it's just it's wild. It's a great workout and you can't think about anything else while you were doing it. Because it's you will fall immediately.

Learning new things is like I think a big part of what What brings meaning and joy to life. We'll link to some of your annual challenges in the show notes because you you've tackled some very hard things, including including Mandarin, which is is certainly not one of the easier options out there, having having been an East Asian studies major back in the day. All right, so I'll ask the technical question and i if you know it may be boring. But then then we'll we'll start to wrap up right after that. This is a question from a friend who's uh technologist and he's very curious how you're thinking about

Computing for smart glasses. So his question was, and this is a bit of a a left turn yet again. But with respect to the metaverse. If the phone is one of the best places to do the computing, how do you think about navigating say phones that operate on OSs that you don't control or how how are you foreseeing the future?

of that unfolding. One of the Wildest technical challenges. For augmented reality is that It needs to basically you need to fit all the stuff into

Essentially a normal pair of glasses. But so VR will always It's supposed to be immersive. So I mean maybe it'll eventually be more like ski goggles where it'll be it'll be kinda thinner. But it's it's not like meant to just look like normal glasses whereas augmented reality if you're gonna wear that throughout the day

It really, you know, it needs to it needs to be socially acceptable. So you're you're basically talking about you know the normal Frames of glasses. Maybe call thickram frames. Maybe five millimeters thick. Right, so within that you're talking about fitting What would have been called a super computer five or ten years ago.

Basically like a laser projector and then the tools to basically Have that. Display kind of Holograms with wave guides because In order to make sure that the image sta and the hologram stays synced in the right place, it needs to know what your eye position is. You need like lasers that understand.

Where your eyes are and then Needs to have speakers'cause of course you're gonna want sound. Um it needs microphones'cause you're gonna wanna have an assistant and and talk to it. has sort of positional trackings that way if like I'm sitting on your couch as a hologram and you move your head. I'm not moving off the couch. It like needs to know exactly where you're looking at. So okay, all that stuff. To do all that computation instantly in glasses that have that are five millimeters thick. So

I think this is like One of the wildest technical challenges of the next ten or fifteen years, which is why I'm so excited about it. It's um This odd thing where I I think sometimes people get Really inspired by

Physically big things. But I actually think miniaturizing things to be tiny. is in a lot of ways even a harder challenge. So This is a lot of the work that's That's gonna happen.

Will it be valuable to have Another phone or something like that. I don't know, maybe on the one hand you can offload Computing, so that's good. One of the biggest

Things that that basically Is eliminating factors actually heat dissipation. So if you have a processor that's running on your glasses and it's getting hot, it's like you're making your face kinda warm and that's um uncomfortable. So if you can have that in your pocket, that's Better? But on the flip side. You need to

Find a way to get all that stuff to the glasses and back. And Wireless chips are actually pretty energy intensive, too. So it some point You're gonna always have some computation on the glasses. the kind of equilibrium I don't think is to have all of the computation

Somewhere else. And Then you start getting into this interesting trade off, which is okay, well if you're Apple and you have the iPhone Is that an advantage and I think that there are there are a bunch of different questions in that. One is

to what extent are they just going to advantage their own devices or they're going to make it so that some of the APIs are open? And I think that this is somewhat of a regulatory question, right? It's like are they going to be allowed to just make something that has You know, they they have a billion iPhones out there. Are the regulatory agencies around the world going to allow them to just like only make it so that their glasses work with their thing? It would seem to me like that there would be an issue with that. But then there's this other issue. Which is

If you were designing a secondary device for say input or something like that. It probably wouldn't look like a phone exactly. So there's also some ways in which I think when new computing platforms come around People.

Tend to assume that that model is sort of gonna work and that Whatever the new thing is just sort of a peripheral to that existing platform. But I think it it kinda depends. You know, it's like maybe the watch is more of a peripheral to your phone. But I would guess that augmented in virtual reality. Are so fundamentally different.

That whatever you want in your constellation of devices You probably want it to be designed specifically for that. And not just like okay, you happen to have a phone so now let's shoehard and into into doing augmented reality too. So I know there's like a lot of interesting questions in this. But

I don't know, at the end of the day I I think that there's like uh just a ton to be invented and there are a lot of different ways that this could go. Thank you, Mark. And I appreciate you taking so much time in what is an incredibly busy week, I can only imagine. Is there anything else that you would like to touch on? Any requests to the audience? Anything at all that you'd like to Chat about or mention before we Bring this to a close. I mean this was a pretty wide ranging conversation.

I mean I I've I've never had someone starting By asking me about fencing and I don't think I've ever done an interview where we've talked or podcast where we've talked so much about sports I'm I don't know. I feel like we could do a whole nother one of these. I mean we we didn't feel like we could we didn't go into um Into science at all or curing diseases. I know. I know. There's there's a whole whole nother session on that, maybe like another couple of hours at some point. But Yeah, for sure.

This has been a lot of fun. Thank you for having me on. Of course. I really appreciate you being on and uh making the time for it. And to everybody listening, we'll also link to everything in the show notes, certainly. And if there are any additional resources, Mark, that you or your team would like to put in the show notes, we can add those in the show notes at tomb.blog slash podcast. And uh certainly people can find you online rather easily, I would say. Facebook. Zuck, Instagram slash Zuck. And uh uh of course people can find meta at meta.com

And It's been fun to have a wide ranging conversation and as expected I have many, many pages of topics left that we could cover and and certainly the the science and research side is something that's, you know, if the opportunity presents itself, I'd love to get into at some point. But I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation, Mark. This has been fun. Thanks for having me. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests, and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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