Kind: captions
Language: en
let's talk about free speech and
censorship you don't build a company
like this unless you believe that people
expressing themselves is a good thing
let me ask you as a father does it weigh
heavy on you that people get bullied on
social networks i care a lot about how
people feel when they use our products
and i don't want to build products that
make people angry why do you think so
many people dislike you
some even hate you
and how do you regain their trust and
support
the following is a conversation with
mark zuckerberg ceo of facebook now
called meta
please allow me to say a few words about
this conversation with mark zuckerberg
about social media and about what
troubles me in the world today
and what gives me hope
if this is not interesting to you i
understand please skip
i believe that at its best social media
puts a mirror to humanity and reveals
the full complexity of our world
shining a light on the dark aspects of
human nature and giving us hope a way
out through compassionate but tense
chaos of conversation that eventually
can turn into understanding friendship
and even love
but this is not simple
our world is not simple it is full of
human suffering
i think about the hundreds of millions
of people who are starving and who live
in extreme poverty
the 1 million people who take their own
life every year
the 20 million people that attempt it
and the many many more millions who
suffer quietly in ways that numbers can
never know
i'm troubled by the cruelty and pain of
war
today my heart goes out to the people of
ukraine
my grandfather spilled his blood on this
land
held the line as a machine gunner
against the nazi invasion surviving
impossible odds
i am nothing without him
his blood runs in my blood
my words are useless here
i send my love
it's all i have
i hope to travel to russia and ukraine
soon
i will speak to citizens and leaders
including vladimir putin
as i've said in the past i don't care
about access fame money or power
and i'm afraid of nothing
but i am who i am and my goal in
conversation is to understand the human
being before me no matter who they are
no matter their position
and i do believe the line between good
and evil runs through the heart of every
man
so this is it
this is our world
it is full of hate
violence and destruction
but it is also full of love
beauty
and the insatiable desire to help each
other
the people who run the social networks
that show this world
that show us to ourselves
have the greatest of responsibilities
in a time of war pandemic atrocity we
turn to social networks to share real
human insights and experiences to
organize protests and celebrations to
learn and to challenge our understanding
of the world of our history and of our
future
and above all to be reminded of our
common humanity
when the social networks fail they have
the power to cause immense suffering
and when they succeed they have the
power to lessen that suffering
this is hard
it's a responsibility perhaps almost
unlike any other in history
this podcast conversation attempts to
understand the man and the company who
take this responsibility on
where they fail when they hope to
succeed
mark zuckerberg's feet are often held to
the fire as they should be and this
actually gives me hope
the power of innovation and engineering
coupled with the freedom of speech in
the form of its highest ideal i believe
can solve any problem in the world
but that's just it
both are necessary
the engineer and the critic
i believe that criticism is essential
but
cynicism is not
and i worry that in our public discourse
cynicism too easily masquerades as
wisdom as truth
becomes viral and takes over and worse
suffocates the dreams of young minds who
want to build solutions to the problems
of the world
we need to inspire those young minds
at least for me
they give me hope
and one small way i'm trying to
contribute is to have honest
conversations like these that don't just
ride the viral wave of cynicism but seek
to understand the failures and successes
of the past the problems before us and
the possible solutions in this very
complicated world of ours
i'm sure i will fail often
and i count on the critic
to point it out when i do but i ask for
one thing and that is to fuel the fire
of optimism
especially those who dream to build
solutions
because without that
we don't have a chance
on this too fragile tiny planet of ours
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's mark
zuckerberg
can you circle all the traffic lights
please
you actually did it that is very
impressive performance
okay now we can initiate the interview
procedure
is it possible that this conversation is
happening inside the metaverse created
by you by meta many years from now and
we're doing a memory replay experience i
don't know the answer to that then
you're then i'd be some
some computer construct and
not the person who created that meta
company but that would truly be meta
right so this could be somebody else
using the the mark zuckerberg avatar
who can do the mark and the lex
conversation replay from
four decades ago when when meta for it
was first i mean it's not going to be
four decades before we have
photorealistic avatars like this
so i think we're much closer to that
well that's something you talk about is
uh how passionate you are about the idea
of the avatar representing who you are
in the metaverse so i i do these
podcasts in person
you know i'm a stickler for that because
there's a magic to the in-person
conversation
how long do you think it'll be before
you can have the same kind of magic in
the metaverse the same kind of intimacy
in the chemistry whatever the heck is
there when we're talking a person
how how difficult is it how long before
we have it in the metaverse
well i think that's this is like the key
question right because the
the thing that's different about
virtual and hopefully augmented reality
compared to all other forms of of
digital platforms before is this feeling
of presence right the feeling that
you're right that you're in an
experience and that you're there with
other people or in another place
and that's just different from all the
other screens that we have today right
phones tvs all the stuff it's you know
they're trying to in some cases deliver
experiences that feel
um
high fidelity but at no point do you
actually feel like you're in it right at
some level your content is trying to
sort of convince you that this is a
realistic thing that's happening but all
of the kind of subtle signals are
telling you now you're looking at a
screen
so
the question about how you develop these
systems is like
what are all of the things that make the
physical world all the different cues so
i i think on
visual presence
and
spatial audio
we're making reasonable progress spatial
audio makes a huge deal i don't know if
you've tried this experience um
workrooms that we launched where you
have meetings and you know i i basically
made a rule for you know all of the the
top you know management folks at the
company that they need to be doing
standing meetings in in work rooms
already right i feel like we got a dog
food this you know this is how people
are going to work um in the future so we
we have to adopt this now
and there are already a lot of things
that i think feel significantly better
than
than like typical zoom meetings even
though the avatars are a lot lower
fidelity
um
you know the idea that you have spatial
audio you're around a table in vr with
people
if someone's talking from over there it
sounds like it's talking from over there
you can see you know the the the arm
gestures and stuff feel more natural um
you can have side conversations which is
something that you can't really do in
zoom i mean i guess you can text someone
over or like out of band but
and if you're actually sitting around a
table with people um you know you can
lean over and whisper to the person next
to you and like have a conversation that
you can't you know that that you can't
really do with um
in in um in just video communication so
i think it's interesting
in what ways
some of these things already feel more
real than a lot of the technology that
we have
even when the visual fidelity isn't
quite there but i think it'll get there
over the next few years now i mean you
were asking about comparing that to the
true physical world not zoom or
something like that and
there i mean i think you have feelings
of like
temperature
um you know olfactory um obviously touch
right we're working on haptic gloves um
you know the the sense that you want to
be able to you know put your hands down
and feel some pressure from the table um
you know all these things i think are
going to be really critical to be able
to keep up this illusion that you're in
a world and that you're fully present in
this world but i don't know i think
we're going to have a lot of these
building blocks within you know the next
10 years or so and even before that i
think it's amazing how much you're just
going to build with software that sort
of masks some of these things um
i i realize i'm going long but i you
know i was told we have a few hours here
yeah so it's here for five to six hours
yeah so i mean it's look i mean that
that's that's on the shorter end of the
congressional testimonies i've done um
but it's um
but
you know one of the things that we found
with
with hand presence right so the the
earliest vr you just had the headset and
then um that was cool you could look
around you feel like you're in a place
but you don't feel like you're really
able to interact with it until you have
hands and then there's this big question
where once you got hands what's the
right way to represent them and
initially
all of our assumptions was okay when i
look down and see my hands in the
physical world i see an arm and it's
gonna be super weird if you see you know
just your hand
um
but it turned out to not be the case
because there's this issue with your
arms which is like what's your elbow
angle and if the elbow angle that we're
kind of interpolating based on where
your hand is and where your headset is
actually isn't accurate it creates this
very uncomfortable feeling where it's
like oh like my arm is actually out like
this but it's like showing it in here
and that actually broke the the feeling
of presence a lot more whereas it turns
out that if you just show the hands and
you don't show the arms um
it actually is fine for people so i
think that there's a bunch of these
interesting psychological cues where
it'll be more about getting the right
details right and i think a lot of that
will be possible even over you know a
few year period or five year period and
we won't need like every single thing to
be solved to deliver this like full
sense of presence yeah it's a
fascinating psychology question of what
is
the essence
that makes in-person conversation um
special it's like emojis are able to
convey emotion really well even though
they're obviously not photorealistic
and so in that same way just like you're
saying just showing the hands is able to
uh create a comfortable expression with
your hands so i wonder what that is you
know people in in the world wars used to
write letters and you can fall in love
with just writing letters you don't need
to see each other in person you can
convey emotion you can a
depth of uh
experience with just words so that's a i
think a fascinating place to explore
psychology of like how do you find that
intimacy yeah and you know the way that
i come to all of this stuff is you know
i basically studied psychology and
computer science so all of the work that
i do
is sort of at the intersection of those
things i think most of the other big
tech companies are building technology
for you to interact with what i care
about is building technology to help
people interact with each other so it's
i think it's a somewhat different
approach than most of the other tech
entrepreneurs and and big companies come
at this from
and
a lot of the lessons
in terms of how i think about designing
products come from
some just basic elements of psychology
right in terms of you know our brains
you know you can compare to the brains
of other animals you know we're very
wired to specific things facial
expressions right we're
we're very visual right so compared to
other animals i mean that's that's
clearly the the main sense that most
people have
but there's a whole part of your brain
that's just kind of focused on on
reading facial cues so you know when
we're designing the next version of
quest or the vr headset a big focus for
us is face tracking and basically eye
tracking so you can make eye contact
which again isn't really something that
you can do over a video conference it's
sort of amazing how
much um how far video conferencing has
gotten without the ability to make eye
contact right it's sort of a bizarre
thing if you think about it you're like
looking at someone's face um you know
sometimes for you know an hour when
you're in a meeting and like
you looking at their eyes
to them doesn't look like you're looking
at their eyes so it's a
you're always looking at me past each
other i guess yeah i guess you're right
you're not sitting where you're trying
to right you're trying like a lot of
times i mean or at least i find myself
i'm trying to look into the other
person's eyes because they don't feel
like you're like yeah so then the
question is am i supposed to look at the
camera so that way you can you know have
a sensation that i'm looking at you i
think that that's an interesting
question and then you know with vr
um today even without
eye tracking and knowing what your eyes
are actually looking at you can fake it
reasonably well right so you can look at
like where the head pose is and if it
looks like i'm kind of looking in your
general direction then you can sort of
assume that maybe there's some eye
contact intended and and you can do it
in a way where it's okay maybe not it's
like a maybe it's not a
fixated stare but um but it's it's
somewhat natural but once you have
actual eye tracking you can you can do
it for real and i think that's really
important stuff so when i think about
meta's contribution to this field i have
to say it's not clear to me that any of
the other companies that are focused on
on the metaverse or on virtual and
augmented reality are gonna prioritize
putting these features in the hardware
because
like everything they're trade-offs right
i mean they it adds it adds some weight
to the device maybe it adds some
thickness you could totally see another
company taking the approach let's just
make the lightest and thinnest thing
possible but you know i want us to
design the most human thing possible uh
that that creates the richest sense of
presence and um because so much of of
human
um emotion and expression comes from
these like micro movements if i like
move my eyebrow you know millimeter you
will notice and that like means
something um so the fact that we're
losing these signals um in a lot of
communication i think is is is a loss
and it's so it's not like okay there's
one feature and you add this then it all
of a sudden is going to feel like we
have real presence you can sort of look
at how the the human brain works and how
we we express and and kind of read
emotions and you can just build a road
map of that you know of just what are
the most important things to try to
unlock over a five to ten year period
and just try to make the experience more
and more human and social
when do you think
would be uh a moment
like a singularity moment for the
metaverse where
there's a lot of ways to ask this
question but you know
people will have
many or most of their meaningful
experiences in the metaverse versus the
real world and actually it's interesting
to think about the fact that a lot of
people are having
the most important moments of their life
happen in the digital sphere especially
not jenkovid
you know like even falling in love or
meeting friends or getting excited about
stuff that is happening on a 2d digital
plane when do you think the metaverse
will provide those experiences
for a large number like a yeah i think
it's a really popular good question
there was
someone you know i read this piece that
frame this says
a lot of people think that the metaverse
is about a place
but
one definition of this is it's about
a time when basically immersive digital
worlds become the primary way that we
that we live our lives and spend our
time um i think that's a reasonable
construct and from that perspective you
know i think um
you also just want to look at this as a
continuation because it's not like
okay we are building digital worlds but
we don't have that today i think you
know
you know you and i probably already live
a very large part of our life in digital
worlds they're just not 3d immersive
virtual reality but you know i do a lot
of meetings over video or and i spend a
lot of time writing things over email or
whatsapp or or whatever so what is it
going to take to get there for kind of
the immersive presence version of this
which i think is what you're asking um
and for that i think that there's just a
bunch of different use cases right and
and um
i think when you're when you're building
technology i think
you're
a lot of it is just you're managing this
duality where on the one hand you want
to build these elegant things that can
scale and you know have billions of
people use them and get value from them
and then on the other hand
you're fighting this kind of ground game
where it's just there are just a lot of
different use cases and people do
different things and like you want to be
able to unlock them so the first ones
that we basically went after
were gaming
with quest
and social experiences and this is you
know it goes back to when we started
working on virtual reality my theory at
the time was basically
people thought about it as gaming
but
if you look at all computing platforms
up to that point um you know gaming is a
huge part it was a huge part of pcs it
was a huge part of mobile
but it was also very
decentralized right there wasn't you
know for the most part you know one or
two gaming companies there were a lot of
gaming companies and gaming is somewhat
hits based i mean we're getting some
games that are that have more longevity
but um but but in general you know there
were a lot of a lot of different games
out there
but on pc and
um
and on mobile
the companies that focused on
communication and social interaction
there tended to be a smaller number of
those and that ended up being just as
important of a thing as all of the games
that you did combined i think
productivity is another area that's
obviously something that we've
historically been less focused on but i
think it's going to be really important
workroom or give me productivity in the
collaborative aspect i think that
there's there's a
there's a workrooms aspect of this like
a meeting aspect and then i think that
there's like a um you know word excel um
you know productivity um
you're like you're working or coding or
what knowledge work right it's as
opposed to just to just meetings so you
can kind of go through all these
different use cases you know gaming i
think we're well on our way
social i think
we're we're just the the kind of
preeminent company that focuses on this
and i think that's already on quest
becoming
the you know if you look at the list of
what are the top apps um
you know social apps are already you
know number one two three so that's kind
of becoming a critical thing
um
but i don't know i would imagine for
someone like you it'll be you know until
we get you know a lot of the work things
dialed in right when this is just like
much more adopted
and and clearly better than zoom for vc
when you know if you're doing your your
coding or your writing or whatever it is
um in vr which it's not that far off to
imagine that because pretty soon you're
just gonna have a screen that's bigger
than you know it'll be your ideal setup
and you can bring it with you and you
know put it on anywhere and have your
your kind of ideal workstation so i i
think there are a few things to work out
on that but
i don't think that that's more than you
know five years off
um and then you'll get a bunch of other
things that like aren't even
possible or you don't even think about
using a phone or pc for today like
fitness right so i mean i know
you're um
we were talking before about how you're
you're into running and like i'm really
into a lot of things around fitness as
well um you know different things in
different places i got really into
hydrofoiling recently and nice um yeah
i saw video yeah and surfing and um
and i used to fence competitively i like
run so and you were saying that you were
thinking about trying different martial
arts and i tried to trick you and
convince you into doing uh brazilian jiu
jitsu or you actually mentioned that
that was one you're curious about and
is that a trick
yeah i don't know
we're in the metaverse now yeah i think
i mean i took that seriously i thought
that was a that was a real uh
uh
suggestion that would be an amazing
chance if we ever step on the mat
together and just like roll around i'll
show you some moves well give me a year
to train and and then and then is like
rock you know you've seen rocky iv where
the russian faces off the america i'm
the russian in this picture and then you
you're the rocky the underdog that gets
to to win the idea of me as rocky
and like fighting is um
if he dies he dies
i mean anyway yeah but i mean a lot of
aspects of fitness
you know i don't know if you've
if you've tried supernatural on quest or
so first of all can i just comment on
the fact every time i played around with
quest two
i i just i get giddy every time i step
into virtual reality so you mentioned
productivity all those kinds of things
that's definitely
something i'm excited about but really i
just love
the possibilities of stepping into that
world it's it's uh maybe it's the
introvert in me but it just feels like
the most convenient way to travel
into worlds into worlds that are similar
to the real world or totally different
it's like alice in wonderland just try
out crazy stuff the possibilities are
endless and i just i personally
am just
love
get excited for uh stepping in those
virtual worlds i'm so i'm a huge fan in
terms of the uh
the productivity as a program i spent
most of my day programming that's that's
really interesting also but then you
have to develop the right ids you have
to develop yeah like the there has to be
a threshold where a large amount of the
programming community moves there but
the collaborative aspects that are
possible in terms of meetings in terms
of the uh
when when two coders are working
together
i mean that the possibilities they're
super super exciting
i think that
in building this
we sort of need to balance
there are going to be some new things
that you just couldn't do before and
those are going to be the amazing
experiences so teleporting to any place
right whether it's a real place or
something that people made
i mean some of the experiences around
how we can build stuff in new ways where
you know
a lot of the stuff that you know when
i'm coding stuff it's like alright you
code it and then you build it and then
you see it afterwards but increasingly
it's going to be possible to you know
you're in a world and you're building
the world as you are in it and and kind
of manipulating it you know one of the
things that we showed at our inside the
lab
for recent artificial intelligence
progress is this builder bot program
where now you are you can just talk to
it and say hey okay i'm in this world
like put put some trees over there and
it'll do that and like all right put put
some bottles of water on um you know on
on our picnic blanket and it'll do that
and you're in the world and it's i think
they're going to be new paradigms for
coding so yeah there are going to be
some things that i think are just
pretty amazing especially the first few
times that you do them that you're like
whoa like i've never had an experience
like this
but
most of your life
i would imagine is not doing things that
are amazing for the first time um a lot
of this in terms of i mean just
answering your question from before
around what is it going to take before
you're spending most of your time in
this well first of all
let me just say it as an aside the goal
isn't to have people spend a lot more
time in computing i'm asking myself when
will i spend all of my time in it's to
make yeah it's to make computing more
more natural but yes um
but i think it'll you will you will
spend more most of your computing time
in this
when it does the things that you use
computing for somewhat better so you
know maybe um having your perfect
workstation is a
five percent improvement on your coding
productivity it maybe it's not like a
you know completely new new thing um but
i mean look if if i could increase the
productivity of every engineer in meta
by five percent um
you know we'd buy those devices for
everyone and i i imagine you know a lot
of other companies would too and that's
how you start getting to the scale that
um that i think you know makes this
rival some of the bigger computing
platforms that exist today let me ask
you about identity we talked about the
avatar
how do you see identity in the metaverse
should the avatar be tied to your
identity
or can it be
can i be anything in the metaverse like
can i
be whatever the heck i want can i even
be a troll so there's there's a there's
a exciting freeing possibilities and
there's the darker possibilities too
yeah i mean i think that there's going
to be a range right so
we're working on
for expression and avatars
um on one end of the spectrum are kind
of expressive and cartoonish avatars and
then on the other end of the spectrum
are photorealistic avatars and i just
think the reality is that they're going
to be different use cases for different
things um and i guess there's another
axis so if you're going from
photorealistic to expressive there's
also like representing you directly
versus like some fantasy identity and i
think that there are going to be things
on on all ends of that spectrum too
right so you'll want photo like in in
some experience you might want to be
like a photo realistic dragon right or
um or you know if i'm playing onward or
which is this military simulator game um
you know it's
you know i think getting to be more
photorealistic as a soldier and that um
could enhance the experience um
there are times when i'm hanging out
with friends where i want them to um you
know know it's me so a kind of
cartoon-ish or expressive version of me
is good but
there are also experiences like um you
know vr chat does this well today where
a lot of the experience is kind of
dressing up and wearing um a fantastical
avatar that's almost like a meme or is
humorous so you you come into an
experience and it's almost like you have
like a built-in icebreaker because like
you you see people and you're just like
all right i i like i'm cracking up at
what you're wearing because that's funny
and it's just like where'd you get that
or oh you made that that's you know it's
awesome
um
whereas you know okay if you're going
into a into a work meeting maybe a
photorealistic version of your real self
is is gonna be the most appropriate
thing for that so i think the reality is
there aren't going to be
there's it's not just going to be one
thing um
you know my my own sense of
kind of how you want to
express identity online has sort of
evolved over time and that you know
early days in facebook i thought okay
people are going to have one identity
and now i think that's clearly not going
to be the case i think you're going to
have all these different things and
there's utility and being able to do
different things so
um
some of the technical challenges that
i'm really interested in around it are
how do you build the software to allow
people to seamlessly go between them
so say
so you could view them as
just completely
discreet points on a spectrum but
let's talk about the metaverse economy
for a second let's say i buy a digital
shirt
for my photo realistic avatar um which
by the way i think at the time where
we're spending a lot of time in the
metaverse doing a lot of our work
meetings in the metaverse and etc i
would imagine that the economy around
virtual clothing as an example is going
to be quite as big why wouldn't i spend
almost as much money
in investing in my my appearance or
expression for my photorealistic avatar
for meetings as i would for the whatever
i'm going to wear in my video chat but
the question is okay so you let's say
you buy some shirt for your photo
realistic avatar
wouldn't it be cool
if there was a way to basically
um
translate that into a more expressive
thing
for your kind of cartoonish or
expressive avatar and there are multiple
ways to do that you can view them as two
discrete points and okay maybe you know
if a designer
sells one thing then it actually comes
in a pack and there's two and you can
use um either one on that but but i
actually think this stuff might exist
more as a spectrum in the future and
that's what
i do think the direction on some of the
ai advances that is happening to be able
to especially stuff around like style
transfer being able to take um you know
a piece of art or or express something
and say okay paint me you know this
photo um
in the style of gogan or you know
whoever it is that you're you're
interested in um you know take this
shirt and put it in the style of what
i've designed for my expressive avatar
um
i think that's going to be pretty
compelling and so the fashion you you
might be buying like a generator like a
closet that generates a style
and then
like like with the gans they'll be able
to infinitely generate outfits thereby
making it so the reason i wear the same
thing all the time is that don't like
choice you're talking about you've
talked about the same thing but now you
don't even have to choose your closet
generates your outfit for you every time
so you have to
live without the generates
i mean you could do that although
no i think that that's i think some
people will but i think like
i think there's going to be a huge
aspect of
of just people doing creative commerce
here so i think there is going to be a
big market around people designing
digital clothing um but the question is
if you're designing digital clothing do
you need to design if you're if you're
the designer do you need to make it for
each kind of specific discrete point
along a spectrum
or you design are you just designing it
for kind of a photo realistic case or an
expressive case or can you design one
and have it translate across these
things um you know if i if i buy a style
from you know a designer who i care
about and now i'm a dragon you know is
there a way to morph that so it like
goes on the dragon in a way that makes
sense um and that i think is an
interesting ai problem because you're
probably not going to make it so that
like that designers have to go design
for all those things but the more useful
the digital content is that you buy in a
lot of uses
in a lot of use cases
the the more that economy will just
explode and that's a lot of what you
know all of the um
you know
we were joking about nfts before but i
think a lot of the promise here is that
if the digital goods that you buy are
not just tied to one platform or one use
case they end up being more valuable
which means that people are more willing
and more likely to invest in them and
that
that just spurs the whole economy but
the question is that's a fascinating
positive aspect but the potential
negative aspect is that
you can have people concealing their
identity in order to troll or even not
people bots
so how do you know in the metaverse that
you're talking to a real human or an ai
or a well-intentioned human is that
something you think about something
you're concerned about
well
let's break that down into a few
different cases i mean because knowing
that you're talking to someone who has
good intentions is something that i
think is not even solved in right in
pretty much anywhere but
i mean if you're talking to someone
who's a dragon i think it's pretty clear
that they're not representing themselves
as a person i think probably the most
pernicious thing that you want to
solve for is um
i think probably one of the scariest
ones is how do you make sure that
someone isn't impersonating you right so
like okay you're in a future version of
of this conversation yeah and we have
photorealistic avatars and we're doing
this in work rooms or whatever the
future version of that is and someone
walks in who like looks like me um how
do you know that that's me and
one of the things that we're that we're
thinking about
is you know it's this
it's still a pretty big ai project to be
able to generate photorealistic avatars
that basically can like they work like
these codecs of you right so you you
kind of have a map from your your
headset and whatever sensors what your
body is actually doing and it takes the
model in it and it kind of displays it
in vr but there's a question which is
should there be some sort of biometric
security so that like when i put on my
vr headset or i'm going to you know go
use that avatar i need to first prove
that i am that and i think you probably
are going to want something like that so
um so that's you know as we're
developing these technologies we're also
thinking about the security for things
like that um because you know people
aren't going to want to be impersonated
that's a that's a huge security issue
um
then you just get the question of people
hiding behind
fake accounts to do malicious things
which
is not going to be unique to the
metaverse although
you know certainly
in a
environment where it's more immersive
and you have more of a sense of presence
it could be more
painful more painful but this is
obviously something that we've just
dealt with for
years um in social media and the
internet more broadly and there i think
um
there have been a bunch of tactics that
that i think um
we've just evolved to you know we've
built up these
different ai systems to basically get a
sense of is this
account
behaving in the way that a person would
and
it turns out you know so in all of the
work that we've done um
around you know we call it community
integrity and it's basically like
policing
harmful content and trying to figure out
where to draw the line and there are all
these like really hard and philosophical
questions around like where do you draw
the line on some of this stuff and
the the thing that i i've kind of found
the most effective
is
as much as possible trying to figure out
who are the uh inauthentic accounts or
where the accounts that are behaving in
an overall harmful way at the account
level
rather than trying to get into like
policing what they're saying right which
i think the metaverse is going to even
harder um because that the metaverse i
think will have more properties of
um it's almost more like a phone call
right or like or you're you know it's
not like i post a piece of content and
is that piece of content good or bad
um so i think more of this stuff will
have to be done at the level of
um of the account but
this is the area where you know between
the
the kind of
um
you know counterintelligence teams that
we built up inside the company and like
years of building um
just different ai
systems to basically detect what is a
real account and what isn't i'm not
saying we're perfect but like this is an
area where i just think we are like
years ahead of basically anyone else in
the in the industry in terms of having
um
uh built those capabilities and i think
that just is going to be incredibly
important for this next wave of things
and like you said on the technical level
on a philosophical level it's an
incredibly difficult problem to solve
uh by the way i i would probably like to
open source my avatar so there could be
like millions of lexes walking around
just like an army like agent smith agent
smith yeah exactly
uh so the uh the unity ml folks built a
copy of me
and they sent it to me
so there's a there's a person running
around and i've just been doing
reinforcement learning on it i was gonna
release it
now
because you know just to have
sort of like thousands of lexus doing uh
reinforcements so they fall over
naturally they have to learn how to like
walk around and stuff so i love that
idea this tension between biometric
security you want to have one identity
but then certain avatars you might have
to have many
um i don't know which is better security
sort of uh flooding the world with lexus
and thereby achieving security or really
being protective of your identity i i
have to ask a security question actually
well how does flooding the world with
lexus help me know in our conversation
that i'm talking to the real ex i
completely destroy the trust in all my
relationships then right if i flood
because then
it's yeah that um
i think that one's not going to work
that well for you it's not going to work
that way i mean for the original
it probably fits some things like if
you're a public figure and you're trying
to
have
you know a bunch of
if you're trying to show up in a bunch
of different places in the future you'll
be able to do that in the metaverse um
so that kind of replication i think will
be useful but i do think you're gonna
want a notion of like
i am talking to the real one
yeah
yeah especially if the if the fake ones
start outperforming you and all your
private relationships and then you're
left behind i mean that's that's the
serious concern i have with clones again
the things i think about okay so i
recently got i used qnap nas storage
such as storage for video and stuff and
i recently got hacked it's the first
time for me with a with ransomware it's
not me personally it's all qnap devices
uh
so the the question that people have
about is about security in general
um because i was doing a lot of the
right things in terms of security and
nevertheless ransomware
basically disabled my device yeah is
that something you think about what are
what are the different steps you could
take to protect people's data on the
security front
i think that there's
different solutions for
in strategies where it makes sense to
have stuff kind of put behind a fortress
right so the centralized model versus
um decentralizing then i think both have
strengths and weaknesses so i think
anyone who says okay just decentralize
everything that'll make it more secure i
i think that that's tough because you
know i mean the advantage of something
like you know encryption is that
you know
we run the largest encrypted service in
the world with whatsapp and you know
we're one of the first to roll out a
multi-platform encryption
um service and that's you know something
that
i think was a big advance for the
industry and one of the promises that we
can basically make because of that our
company doesn't see
when you're sending an encrypted message
and an encrypted message what the
content is of what you're what you're
sharing so that way if someone hacks
meta servers
they're not going to be able to access
you know the whatsapp message that you
know you're sending to your friend and
that i think matters a lot to people
because um obviously if someone is able
to compromise a company's servers and
that company has hundreds of millions or
billions of people then that's that ends
up being a very big deal
the flip side of that is okay all the
content is on your phone
um
you know are you following security best
practices on your phone if you lose your
phone all your content is gone so that's
an issue you know maybe you go back up
your content from whatsapp or or some
other service in an icloud or something
but then you're just at apple's whims
about are they going to go turn over the
government the the data to you know some
government or or are they going to get
hacked so a lot of the time it is useful
to have
data in a centralized place too because
then you can train systems that um that
can just do much better personalization
i think that in a lot of cases um you
know centralized systems can can offer
you know especially if you're
if you're a you know serious company
you're you're
running the state-of-the-art stuff and
um and you have red teams attacking your
your own stuff and um and
you're putting out bounty programs and
trying to attract some of the best
hackers in the world to go break into
your stuff all the time so any system is
going to have security issues but um but
i think
the best way forward is to basically try
to be as aggressive and open about
hardening the systems as possible not
trying to kind of hide and pretend that
there aren't going to be issues which i
think is over time why
a lot of open source systems have gotten
relatively more secure it's because
they're they're open and you know it's
not rather than pretending that there
aren't going to be issues just people
surface them quicker so i think you want
to adopt that approach as a company and
and just constantly be hardening your
yourself trying to uh stay one step
ahead of the attackers
it's it's an inherently adversarial
space yeah but i think it's an
interesting security is
interesting because of of the different
kind of threats that we've managed over
the last
five years there are ones um
[Music]
where basically the adversaries keep on
getting better and better so trying to
kind of interfere with um you know
security is certainly one area of this
if you have like nation states that are
trying to you know interfere in
elections or something like they're kind
of evolving their tactics whereas on the
other hand
i don't want to be too too simplistic
about it but like if um you know if
someone is saying something hateful
people usually aren't getting smarter
and smarter about how they say hateful
things right so um maybe there's some
element of that but it's a very small
dynamic compared to
um you know how advanced attackers and
some of these other places get over time
i believe most people are good so they
actually get better over time and not
being less hateful because they realize
it's it's not fun being hateful
that's at least the belief i have but
first bathroom break
sure okay
so we'll come back to ai but let me ask
some difficult questions now
social dilemma is a popular documentary
that raised concerns about the effects
of social media and society
you responded with a point-by-point
rebuttal titled what the social dilemma
gets wrong people should read that
i would say the key point they make is
because social media is funded by ads
algorithms want to maximize attention
and engagement and
an effective way to do so is to get
people angry at each other increase
division and so on
can you steal man their criticisms and
arguments that they make in the
documentary as a way to understand the
concern and
as a way to respond to it
well yeah i think i think that that's a
good conversation to have um i i don't
happen to agree with the the conclusions
and i think that they make a few
assumptions that are
um
just very big jumps that i i don't think
are reasonable to make but
i understand overall why people would be
concerned
that
our business model and ads in general
um
we do make more money as people use the
service more in general right so as a
kind of basic assumption okay do we have
an incentive for people to to build a
service that people use more
yes on a lot of levels i mean we we
think what we're doing is good so you
know we think that if people are finding
it useful they'll use it more
or if you just look at it as this
sort of if the only thing we cared about
is money which i i is is not for anyone
who knows me but okay we're a company so
let's say you just kind of um simplified
it down to that then would we want
people to use the services more yes
but then and then you get to the second
question which is
does kind of getting people agitated
make them more likely to use
the services more
and
i think from looking at other media in
the world
especially tv and you know there's the
old news adage if it bleeds it leads
like i think that this is there are
i think there are a bunch of
reasons why someone might think that
um
that kind of provocative content
would be the most engaging
now what i've always found is is two
things one is that will grab someone's
attention in the near term
is not necessarily something that
they're going to appreciate having seen
um or going to be the best over the long
term so i think what what a lot of
people get wrong
is that
we're not i'm not building this company
to like make the most money or get
people to spend the most time on this in
the next quarter or the next year right
i mean i've been doing this for
you know 17 years at this point and i'm
still relatively young and you have a
lot more that i want to do over the
coming decades so like
i think that it's too simplistic to say
hey
this might increase time in the near
term therefore it's what you're going to
do because i actually think a a deeper
look at kind of what my incentives are
the incentives of a company that are
focused on the long term
is to
basically do what people are going to
find valuable over time not what is
going to draw people's attention today
the other thing that i'd say is that
i think a lot of times people look at
this from the perspective of media
um
or or kind of information or civic
discourse but one other way of looking
at this
is just that okay i'm a product designer
right our company you know we build
products
and a big part of building a product is
not just the function and utility of
what you're delivering but the feeling
of how it feels right we spent a lot of
time talking about um you know virtual
reality and how the the kind of key
aspect of that experience is the the
feeling of presence which it's a
visceral thing it's not just about the
utility that you're delivering it's
about like the sensation
and
similarly
i care a lot about how people feel when
they use our products and
i don't want to build products that make
people angry i mean that's like not i
think what we're here on this earth to
do is to you know build something that
you know people spend a bunch of time
doing and it just kind of makes them
angrier to other people i mean i think
that's that's not good that's you know
that's that's not what i think would be
um
sort of a good use of of our time or a
good contribution to the world so okay
you know it's like people
they tell us on a per content basis you
know does this thing you know do i like
it do i love it does it make me angry
does it make me sad and you know based
on that i mean we we choose to basically
show content that makes people angry
less um because
you know of course right if you're if
you're designing a product and you want
people to to be able to um
to connect and and feel good over over a
long period of time then that's um you
know naturally what you're going to do
so i don't know i think overall
i um
i understand
at a high level
if you're not thinking
too deeply about it why that argument
might be appealing
but
i just think if you actually look at
what our real incentives are not just
like
you know is
if we were trying to optimize for the
next week um but like as people working
on this like why are we here and
i i think it's pretty clear that's not
actually how you would want to design
the system i guess one other thing that
i'd say is that you know while we're
focused on the the ads business model
i i do think it's important to note that
a lot of these issues are not unique to
ads i mean so take like a subscription
news business model for example
i think that has you know just as many
potential pitfalls um you know maybe if
someone's paying for a subscription you
don't get paid per piece of content that
they look at but
you know say for example i i think like
a bunch of the partisanship that we see
could potentially be made worse by
you have these these kind of partisan
um
news organizations that basically sell
subscriptions and they're only going to
get people on one side to basically
subscribe to them
so their incentive is not to um print
content or or or produce content that's
kind of centrist or down the line either
um i bet that what a lot of them find is
that if they produce stuff that's that's
kind of more polarizing or more partisan
then um then that is what gets them more
subscribers so
i i think that this stuff is all
um there's no perfect business model
everything has pitfalls um the thing
that i think is great about advertising
is it makes it the consumer services
free which if you if you believe that
everyone should have a voice and
everyone should be able to connect and
that's a great thing um you know as
opposed to building a luxury service
that not everyone can afford but look i
mean every business model you know you
have to be careful about how you're
implementing what you're doing you
responded to a few things there he spoke
to the fact that you know there is a
narrative of malevolence
like um
you know you're leaning into the making
people angry just because it makes more
money in the short term that kind of
thing so you responded to that but
there's also a kind of
reality of human nature
just like you spoke about there's fights
arguments we get in and we don't like
ourselves afterwards but we got into
them anyway so our long-term growth is
i i believe for most of us has to do
with learning
challenging yourself
improving
being kind to each other finding a
community of people that uh
you know you
connect with on a real human level all
that kind of stuff but it does seem when
you look at social media that a lot of
fights break out a lot of arguments
break out a lot of
viral content ends up being sort of
outraged in one direction or the other
and so it's easy from that to infer the
narrative that
social media companies are letting this
outrage become viral
and so they're increasing the division
in the world
and perhaps you can comment on that or
further how can you be
how can you
push back on this narrative how can you
be transparent about this battle because
i think it's not just
motivation or
financials
it's a technical problem too which is
how do you improve
long-term well-being of human beings
i think that going through
some of the design decisions
would be a good conversation but first i
actually think you know i think
you acknowledge that you know that
narrative is somewhat anecdotal and i
think it's worth grounding this
conversation in
the actual research that has been done
on this which
by and large
finds that
social media is not a large driver of
polarization right and um you know i
mean there's been a number of like um
economists and social scientists and
folks who have studied this um in a lot
of polarization it varies around the
world
you know social media is basically in
every country facebook's in pretty much
every country except for china and maybe
north korea
and
um
and you see different trends in
different places
where
you know in a lot of countries
polarization is declining
um in some it's flat in the u.s it's
it's risen sharply
so
the question is what are the unique
phenomena in the different places and i
think for the people who are trying to
say hey social media is the thing that's
doing this i think that that clearly
doesn't hold up because social media is
a phenomenon that is pretty much
equivalent in all of these different
countries and you have researchers like
this economist at stanford matthew
genskow who's just written
at length about this um
and um
you know it's a a bunch of books by you
know political scientists ezra klein and
folks
why we're polarized basically goes
through this decades-long analysis in
the u.s
before i was born basically talking
about some of the forces and kind of
partisan politics and fox news and
different things that predate the
internet in a lot of ways that that i
think are are likely larger contributors
so to the contrary on this not only is
is it
pretty clear that social media is not a
major contributor but most of the
academic studies that i've seen actually
show that social media use
is is correlated with lower polarization
genscow the same person who just did the
study that i that i cited about
longitudinal polarization across
different countries um you know also
did a study that basically showed that
if you looked after you know the 2016
election in the u.s the voters who are
the most polarized um were actually the
ones who were not on the internet
so
and there have been recent other studies
i think in europe um and around the
world basically showing that as people
stop using social media they tend to get
more polarized um then there's a deeper
analysis around okay well what
polarization actually isn't even one
thing um because you know having
different opinions on something isn't i
don't think that that's by itself bad
what what people who study this say is
um
most problematic is what they call
affective polarization which is
basically are you do you have negative
feelings towards people of another group
and the way that a lot of scholars study
this is they basically
ask a group um would you let your kids
marry someone of group x whatever the
the groups are that you're that you're
worried that someone might have negative
feelings towards and in general use of
social media has corresponded to
decreases in that kind of affective
polarization so i i just want to i think
we should talk through the design
decisions and how we handle um the the
kind of specific pieces of content but
overall i think it's just worth
grounding that discussion in the
research that's existed that i think
overwhelmingly shows that the mainstream
narrative around this is just not right
but the the narrative does stay cold
and
it's compelling to a lot of people
there's another question i'd like to ask
you on this
i was looking at various polls and saw
that you're
one of the most disliked tech leaders
today 54 percent unfavorable rating
elon musk is 23
it's basically everybody has a very high
unfavorable rating that are tech leaders
maybe you can help me understand that
why do you think so many people dislike
you
some even hate you
and how do you regain their trust and
support given everything you just said
why are you
losing the battle
in
explaining to people what actual impact
social media has in society
well
i'm curious if that's a u.s survey or
world it is u.s yeah so i think that
there's a few dynamics one is that
our brand
has been
somewhat uniquely challenged in the u.s
compared to other places it's not that
there are i mean other countries we have
issues too but i think in the us there
was
this dynamic where
if you look at like the next sentiment
of kind of coverage or or attitude
towards us you know before 2016 i think
that there were probably very few months
if any where it was negative and since
2016 i think they've probably been very
few months if any then it's been
positive
politics so but i think it's it's a
specific thing and this is very
different from other places so i think
in a lot of other countries in the world
um you know the sentiment towards meta
and our services is is extremely
positive um in the u.s we have more
challenges and i think compared to other
companies
um
you can look at
certain industries
i think if you look at it from like a
partisan perspective um not not from
like a political perspective but just
kind of culturally it's like there are
people who are probably more left of
center and there are people more right
of center and there's you know kind of
blue america and red america there are
certain industries that i think
maybe one
half of the country has a more positive
view towards than another and i think
we're in a
um
one of the positions that we're in that
i think is really challenging is that
because of a lot of the content
decisions that we're that we've
basically had to arbitrate um
and because we're not a partisan company
right we're not we're not a democrat
company or a republican company we're
trying to make the best decisions we can
to help people connect and
and help people have as much voice as
they can while you know having some
rules because it we're running a
community um
the net effect of that is that we're
kind of constantly making decisions that
piss off people in both camps
and
the effect that i've sort of seen
is that when we make a decision
that is
that's a controversial one that's going
to upset
say about half the country
um
those decisions are all negative some um
from a brand perspective because it's
not like like if we make that decision
in one way and you know say half the
country is happy about that particular
decision that we make they tend to not
say oh sweet meta got that one right
they're just like ah you didn't mess
that one up right but their opinion
doesn't tend to go up by that much
whereas the people who who kind of are
on the other side of it um are like god
how could you mess that up like how
could you possibly think that like that
piece of content is okay and should be
up and should not be censored or um
and so i think
the whereas if okay if you leave it up
and
um
you know it's or if you take it down the
people who thought it should be taken
down or you know it's like all right
fine great you didn't mess that one up
so our internal assessment of the kind
of analytics on our brand are basically
anytime one of these big controversial
things comes up in society um
our brand goes down with half of the
country and then like if you and then if
you just kind of extrapolate that out
it's just been very challenging for us
to try to navigate what is a polarizing
country in a principled way where we're
not trying to kind of hew to one side or
the other we're trying to do what we
think is the right thing but then that's
what i think is the right thing for us
to do though so i mean that's that's
what we'll we'll try to keep doing just
as a human being how does it feel though
when you're giving so much of your
day-to-day life to try to
heal the vision to try to do good in the
world as we've talked about
that so many people in the us the place
you call home
have a negative view of you as a leader
as a human being and uh the company you
love
well i mean it's not great um but
but i i mean look if i wanted people to
think positively about me as a person
um
i don't know i'm not sure if you go
build a company i mean it's like like
our social media company it's
exceptionally difficult to do with the
social media yeah so
i mean i don't know there is a
dynamic
where a lot of the other people running
these companies internet companies have
sort of stepped back
and they just do things that are sort of
i don't know less controversial and
um and some of it may be that they just
get tired over time but you know it's um
so i don't know i i i think that you
know running a company is hard building
something at scale is hard you only
really do it for a long period of time
if you really care about what you're
doing
um and
yeah so i mean it's not great but like
but look i i think that at some level
whether
25 of people dislike you or 75 percent
of people dislike you your experience as
a public figure is going to be that
there's a lot of people who dislike you
right so um yeah so i i actually am not
sure how different it is um you know
certainly you know we've
the country's gotten more polarized and
we in particular have gotten you know
more controversial over the last
five or years or so but um
but
i don't know i kind of think like as a
public figure and and leader of one of
these
enterprises comes to the job part of
yeah part of what you do is like and and
look you can't just the answer can't
just be ignore it right because
like a huge part of the job is like you
need to be getting feedback and
internalizing feedback on how you can do
better but i think increasingly what you
need to do is be able to figure out you
know who are the
the kind of good faith critics who are
criticizing you because
they're trying to help you do a better
job rather than tear you down and those
are the people who i just think you have
to cherish and like and and and listen
very closely to the things that they're
saying because you know i think it's
just as dangerous
to tune out everyone who says anything
negative um and just listen to the
people who who are kind of positive and
and support you you know as as it would
be psychologically to pay attention
trying to make people who are never
going to like you like you um so i think
that that's that's just kind of a dance
that that people have to do but but i
mean i you know you kind of develop more
of a feel for like who actually is
trying to accomplish the same types of
things in the world
and
who has different ideas about how to do
that and how can i learn from those
people and like yeah we get stuff wrong
and when the people whose opinions i
respect call me out on getting stuff
wrong
that that hurts and makes me want to do
better but i think at this point i'm
pretty tuned to just all right if
someone if i know they're they're kind
of like operating in bad faith and
they're not really trying to help um
then you know i don't know it's not it's
it doesn't you know i think over time it
just doesn't bother you that much but
you are surrounded by people
that believe in the mission that love
you
are there friends or colleagues in your
inner circle you trust that call you out
on your whenever your thinking
may be misguided as it is for leaders at
times i think we have a famously open
company culture
where we sort of encourage that kind of
dissent
internally which is you know why there's
so much material internally that can
leak out with people sort of disagreeing
is because that's sort of the culture
um you know our management team i think
it's a lot of people you know there are
some newer folks who come in there are
some folks who who have kind of been
there for a while but there's a very
high level of trust and
i would say it is a relatively
confrontational group of people
and my my friends and family i think um
will push me on this but but look it's
not just but but i think you you need
some diversity right it can't just be
um
you know people who are your friends and
family it's also you know i mean there
are there are journalists or analysts or
um you know pure
uh
executives at other companies or um you
know
other people who sort of are insightful
about thinking about the world you know
certain politicians um or people kind of
in that sphere who i just think have
like very insightful perspectives who
um
even if they would
they come at the world from a different
perspective which is sort of what makes
the perspective so valuable but
you know i think fundamentally you're
trying to get to the same place in terms
of you know helping people connect more
helping
the whole world function better not just
you know one place or another um
and i don't know i mean those are the
people whose opinions
really matter to me and and i just it's
you know that's how i learn on a
day-to-day basis people are constantly
sending me comments on stuff or links to
things they found interesting and um and
i don't know it's it's kind of
constantly evolving this model of the
world and and kind of what we should be
aspiring to be
you've talked about you have a famously
open culture
which
comes with
uh the criticism and the painful
experiences so let me ask you another
difficult question
francis hogan the facebook whistleblower
leaked the internal instagram research
into teenagers and well-being
her claim is that instagram is choosing
profit over well-being of teenage girls
so instagram is quote toxic for them
your response titled what our
research really says about teen
well-being and instagram says no
instagram research shows that 11 of 12
well-being issues
teenage girls
who
said they struggled with those difficult
issues also said that instagram made
them better rather than worse
again can you steal man and defend the
point
and uh
francis hoggins characterization of the
study and then help me understand the
positive and negative effects of
instagram and facebook on young people
so
there are certainly questions around
teen mental health that are really
important it's hard to you know as a
parent it's like hard to imagine any set
of questions that are sort of more
important i guess maybe other aspects of
physical health or or well-being um or
probably come to that level but like
these are really important questions
right which is
why we dedicate teams to studying them
um
you know i don't think the internet or
social media um are unique in having
these questions i mean i think people
and there have been sort of magazines
with promoting certain body types for
women and kids for decades but um
you know we really care about this stuff
so we wanted to study it and and of
course you know we didn't expect that
everything was going to be positive all
the time so i mean the reason why you
study this stuff is to try to improve
and get better so i mean look the place
where i disagree with the
characterization first
i thought you know some of the reporting
and coverage of it just took the whole
thing out of proportion and that it
focused on as you said i think there
were like 20 metrics in there and on you
know 18 or 19 the effect of using
instagram was neutral or positive on the
on the team's well-being and there was
one area where where i think um it
showed that we needed to improve and we
took some steps to try to do that um
after doing the research but but i think
having the coverage just focus on that
one without focusing on the you know i
mean i think an accurate
characterization would have been that
kids using instagram or not kids teens
um
is is generally positive for their
mental health um but of course that was
not the narrative that came out so i
think it's hard to that's not a kind of
logical thing to straw man but i sort of
disagr or still man but i sort of
disagree with that overall
characterization i think anyone sort of
looking at this
um
objectively would
um but then you know i mean the the
there is this sort of intent
critique that i think you were getting
at before which which says you know it
assumes some sort of malevolence right
it's like um
which it's it's really hard for me to
really wrap my head around this because
as far as i know
it's not clear that any of the other
tech companies are doing this kind of
research so
why the narrative should form that we
did research because we were studying an
issue because we wanted to understand it
to improve and took steps after that to
try to improve it that your your
interpretation of that would be
that that we did the research and tried
to sweep it under the rug it just it
sort of um
is like
i don't know it's beyond credibility to
me that like that's the accurate
description of the actions that we've
taken compared to the others in the
industry so i don't know that that's
that's kind of that's that's my view on
it um these are really important issues
and there's a lot of stuff that i think
we're going to be working on related to
teen mental health for a long time
including trying to understand this
better
and i would encourage everyone else in
the industry to do this too
yeah i
would love there to be open
conversations and a lot of great
research being released internally and
then also externally
it um it doesn't make me feel good
to see
press obviously get way more clicks
when um
they say negative things about social
media
objectively speaking i can just tell
that there's hunger to say negative
things about social media
and um
i don't understand how that's supposed
to uh lead to an open conversation about
the positives and the negatives the
concerns about social media
especially when you're doing those that
kind of research i mean
i don't know what to do with that but
let me ask you as a father
there's a way heavy on you that people
get bullied on social networks
so people get bullied in their private
life
but now because so much of our life is
in the digital world the bullying moves
from the physical world to the digital
world so you're now creating a platform
[Music]
on which bullying happens and some of
that bullying
can lead to uh
damage to mental health and some of that
bullying can lead to depression even
suicide
does it weigh heavy on you that people
have
committed suicide or will commit suicide
based on the bullying that happens on
social media yeah i mean this is uh
there's a set of harms that we basically
track and build systems to fight against
and
bullying and
um you know self-harm
are
you know i mean these are these are some
of the biggest things that we that we
are most focused on
um
for bullying
like you say it's going to be
while this predates the internet then
it's probably impossible to get rid of
all of it um
you want to give people tools to fight
it
and you and you want to fight it
yourself
and you also want to make sure that
people have the tools to get help when
they need it so i think this isn't like
a question of you know can you get rid
of all bullying i mean it's like all
right um
i mean
i have two daughters and you know they
they fight and you know
push each other around and stuff too and
the question is just how do you how do
you handle that situation
and um
there's a handful of things that i think
you can you can do um
and we talked a little bit before around
some of the ai tools that you can build
to identify when something harmful is is
happening it's actually it's very hard
in bullying because a lot of bullying is
very context specific it's not like
you're trying to fit a a formula of like
you know if if like looking at the
different harms um you know someone
promoting a terrorist group is like
probably one of the simpler things to
generally find because things promoting
that group are gonna you know look a
certain way or feel a certain way
bullying could just be you know someone
making some subtle comment about
someone's appearance that's
idiosyncratic to them and it could look
at just like humor so similar to one
person exactly destructive to another
human being yeah so with bullying i
think there are
there are certain
things that you can find through ai
systems
um but i think it is increasingly
important to just give people more
agency themselves so we've done things
like making it so people can turn off
comments or you know take a break from
um you know hearing from a specific
person without having to signal at all
that they're going to stop following
them or
or kind of make some some stand that
okay i'm not friends with you anymore
i'm not following you i just like i just
don't want to hear about this but i also
don't want to signal um at all publicly
that um or to them that that there's
been an issue
um
and then you get to
some of the more extreme cases like
you're talking about where someone is
thinking about
um self-harm or suicide and
um in there we found that that is a
place where ai can can identify a lot as
as well as people flagging things you
know if people are um expressing
something that is is you know
potentially they're thinking of hurting
themselves those are cues that you can
build systems and you know hundreds of
languages around the world to be able to
identify that and one of the things that
i'm
actually quite proud of is we've we've
built these systems that i think are
clearly leading at this point that not
only identify that but then connect with
local um first responders and have been
able to save i think at this point it's
you know in thousands of cases be able
to get first responders to people
through these systems who really need
them um because of specific plumbing
that we've done between the ai work and
being able to communicate with with
local first responder organizations
we're rolling that out in more places
around the world and um and i think the
team that that worked on that just did
awesome stuff so
i i think that that's a long way of
saying
yeah i mean this is this is a this is a
heavy topic and there's you want to
attack it in a bunch of different ways
um
and and also kind of understand that
some of nature is for people to
to to do this to each other which is
unfortunate but um but you can give
people tools and and build things that
help it's still one hell of a burden
though
a platform that allows people to fall in
love with each other
is also by nature going to be a platform
that allows people to hurt each other
and when you're managing such a platform
it's difficult
and i think you spoke to it but the
psychology of that of being a leader in
that space of creating technology
that's playing in the space like you
mentioned psychology
is really damn difficult
and i mean the burden of that is just
it's just great i just wanted to hear
you speak um
to that point
i have to ask
about the thing you've brought up a few
times which is making controversial
decisions
let's talk about free speech and
censorship
so there are two groups of people
uh pressuring meta on this one group is
upset that facebook
the social network allows misinformation
and quotes to be spread on the platform
the other group are concerned that
facebook censors speech
by calling it misinformation so you're
getting it from both sides
you uh in 2019 october
at georgetown university eloquently
defended the importance of free speech
but then covet came
and the 20 and the 2020 election came
do you worry that outside pressures from
advertisers politicians the public have
forced meta to damage the idea of free
speech that you spoke highly of
just to say some obvious things up front
i don't think pressure from advertisers
or politicians directly in any way
affects how we think about this i think
these are just hard topics um
so let me just take you through our
evolution from kind of the beginning of
the company to where we are now um you
don't build a company like this unless
you believe that people expressing
themselves is a good thing
right so that's sort of the the
foundational thing you can kind of think
about our company
as a formula
where we think giving people voice and
helping people connect creates
opportunity right so those are the two
things that we're always focused on are
sort of helping people connect we talked
about that a lot but also giving people
voice and ability to express themselves
then by the way most of the time when
people express themselves that's not
like
politically controversial content it's
like
expressing something about their
identity that's more related to the
avatar conversation we had earlier in
terms of expressing some facet but
that's what's important to people on a
day-to-day basis and sometimes when
people feel strongly enough about
something it kind of becomes a political
topic
that's sort of always been a thing that
we've focused on
there's always been the question of
safety in this
which you know if you're building a
community i think you have to focus on
safety we've had these community
standards from early on and there are
about
20 different kinds of harm that we track
and try to fight actively we've talked
about some of them already so it so it
includes things like bullying and
harassment um it includes things like um
like terrorism or promoting terrorism um
inciting violence intellectual property
theft and in general i think call it
about 18 out of 20 of those
there's not really a particularly
polarized definition of that um you know
i don't i think you're not really going
to find many people in the country or in
the world um who are trying to say we
should be
um
fighting terrorist content less
i think the the content where there are
a couple of areas where i think this has
gotten more controversial recently which
i'll which i'll talk about um and you're
right that misinformation is is
basically is is is up there and i think
sometimes the definition of hate speech
is up there too
um but i think in general
most of the content that that that i
think we're working on for safety
is is not actually you know people don't
kind of have these questions so it's
sort of this this subset
but if you go back to the beginning of
the company
this was sort of
pre-deep learning days
and therefore and you know i was it was
me and my roommate dustin joined me
and
um
and like
if someone posted something bad
um you know it was
the ai technology did not exist yet to
be able to go
basically look at all the content um
and
we were a small enough outfit that no
one would expect that we could review it
all even if like someone reported at us
we basically did our best right it's
like someone would report it and we'd
we'd try to look at stuff and and
and deal with stuff
and
for called the first um
i don't know
seven or eight years of the company
you know we weren't that big of a
company you know for a lot of that
period we weren't even really profitable
the ai didn't really exist to be able to
do the kind of moderation that we do
today
and then at some point
in kind of the middle of the last decade
that started to flip and we um you know
we became it got to the point where we
were
sort of a larger and more profitable
company and the ai was starting to come
online
to be able to proactively detect some of
the
simpler forms of this so things things
like pornography you could train an
image classifier to you know identify
what a nipple was or you can fight
against terrorist content you still
actually papers on this is great oh of
course technical papers of course there
are you know those are relatively easier
things to train ai to do
then for example understand the nuances
of what is inciting violence in a
hundred languages around the world and
um not have the false positives of like
okay
are you posting about this thing that
might be inciting violence because
you're actually trying to denounce it um
in which case we probably shouldn't take
that down where if you're trying to
denounce something that's inciting
violence um
in in some kind of
dialect in a corner of india um
as opposed to okay actually you're
posting this thing because you're trying
to inside violence okay building an ai
that can basically get to that level of
nuance and all the languages that we
serve um
is something that i think is only really
becoming possible now not not towards
the middle of the last decade but
there's been this evolution
and i think what happened um
you know people sort of woke up after
and
you know a lot of people like okay this
the country is a lot more polarized
there's a lot more um stuff here than we
realized um
why weren't these internet companies on
top of this
and
i think at that point
it was reasonable
feedback
that you know some of this technology
had started becoming possible and at
that point i really did feel like um we
needed to make a substantially larger
investment we'd already worked on this
stuff a lot on ai and on these integrity
problems but that we should basically
invest
you know have a thousand or more
engineers basically work on building
these ai systems to be able to go and
proactively identify the stuff across
all these different areas
okay so we went and did that now we've
built the tools to be able to do that
and now i think it's actually a much
more complicated set of philosophical
rather than technical questions which is
the exact policies which are okay now
we the way that we basically
hold ourselves accountable
is we issue these transparency reports
every quarter and the metric that we
track is for each of those 20
types of of um of harmful content how
much of that content are we taking down
before someone even has to report it to
us right so how effective is our ai at
doing this
but
that basically creates this big question
which is okay now we need to really
be careful about how proactive we set
the ai and where the exact policy lines
are around what we're taking down
it's
certainly at a point now
where
you know i felt like
at the beginning of that journey of
building those ai systems
there's a lot of push they're saying
okay you've got to do more there's
clearly a lot more bad content that that
people aren't reporting um or that
you're not getting to and you need to
get more effective at that and i was
pretty sympathetic to that but then i
think at some point along the way there
started to be almost equal issues on
both sides of okay actually you're kind
of taking down too much stuff right or
or some of the stuff is is borderline um
and and it wasn't really bothering
anyone and they didn't report it um
so is that is that really an issue that
you need to take down um whereas we
still we still have the critique on the
other side too where a lot of people
think we're not doing enough
um
so it's it's become
as we built the technical capacity i
think it becomes
more philosophically interesting almost
where you want to be on the line
and
i just think like you don't want one
person making those decisions so we've
also tried to innovate in terms of
building out this independent oversight
board which has people who are dedicated
to free expression but from around the
world
who people can appeal cases to um so a
lot of the most controversial cases
basically go to them and they make the
final binding decision on how we should
handle that and then of course their
decisions we then try to you know figure
out what the principles are behind those
and encode them into the the algorithms
and how are those people chosen which
you know you're outsourcing a difficult
decision yeah the the initial people
um we chose
a handful of chairs
for the um
for the group
and
we basically
chose the people for
a commitment to free expression
and like
a broad understanding of human rights
and the trade-offs around free
expression so fundamentally people who
are going to lean towards free
expression towards freedom of speech
okay so there's also this idea of fact
checker so jumping around to the
misinformation questions especially
during covid which is an exceptionally
speaking of portals
can i speak to the covid thing and yes i
mean i think one of the hardest set of
questions around free expression because
you asked about georgetown is my stance
fundamentally changed and the answer to
that is
no my my stance has not changed it is
fundamentally the same as when we were
when i when i was talking about george
talking to georgetown from a
philosophical perspective
the challenge with free speech is that
everyone agrees
that there is a line where if you're
actually
about to do physical harm to people
that
there should be restrictions so i mean
there's the famous
supreme court historical example of like
you can't yell fire in a crowded theater
the thing that everyone agrees disagrees
on is what is the definition of real
harm where i think some people think
okay this should only be a very
literal i mean take it back to the
bullying conversation we were just
having where is it is it just harm if
the person is about to hurt themselves
because they've been bullied so hard or
is it actually harm like as they're
being bullied and kind of at what point
in the spectrum is that and that's the
part that there's not agreement on but i
think what people agree on pretty
broadly is that when there is an acute
threat that
it does make sense from a societal
perspective to tolerate less um less
speech
that could be potentially harmful in
that acute situation so i think where
kovid got very difficult
is you know i don't think anyone
expected this to be going on for years
um but
if in in if you'd kind of asked now a
priori would a global pandemic where
um you know a lot of people are dying
and catching this
um is that an emergency that where where
you'd kind of consider it that um you
know it's problematic to to to basically
yell fire in a crowded theater i think
that that probably passes that test so i
know that's
it's a very tricky situation but i i
think the the fundamental commitment to
free expression
is there um and that's that's that's
what i believe and again i don't think
you start this company unless you care
about people being able to express
themselves as much as possible but
but i think that that's um
that's the question right it's like how
do you define what the harm is and how
and how acute that is and what are the
institutions that define that harm a lot
of the criticism
is that the cdc the who the institutions
we've come to trust as a civilization to
uh to give
the line of what is and isn't harm in
terms of health policy have failed uh in
many ways in small ways and in big ways
depending on who you ask and then the
perspective of meta and facebook is like
well
where the hell do i get the information
of what isn't isn't misinformation so
it's a really difficult place to be in
but it's great to hear that you're
leaning towards freedom of speech
on this aspect and
again i think this actually calls to the
fact that we need to reform institutions
that help keep an open mind of what
isn't isn't misinformation
and misinformation has been used to
bully
um on on the internet i mean i just have
you know i'm friends with joe rogan and
he is called as a
i remember hanging out with him in vegas
and somebody yelled stop spreading
misinformation
i mean uh and there's a lot of people
that follow him that believe he's not
spreading misinformation like you can't
just
not acknowledge the fact that there's a
large number of people
that have a different definition of
misinformation that's such a tough place
to be like who do you listen to do you
listen to quote-unquote experts who gets
as a person who has a phd i gotta say i
mean i'm not sure i know what defines an
expert
especially in a new
in a totally new
pandemic or a new catastrophic event
especially when politics is involved and
especially when the newser the the the
media involved that
uh can propagate
sort of outrageous narratives and
thereby make a lot of money like what
the hell who where's the source of truth
and then everybody turns to facebook
it's like please tell me what the source
of truth is
well i mean well how would you handle
this if you're in my position
it's very very very very difficult i
would say
um
i would more speak about how difficult
the choices are and be transparent about
like what the hell do you do with this
like here you go exactly ask the exact
question you just asked me but to the
broader public like okay yeah you guys
tell me what to do so like crowdsource
it and then the other uh the other
aspect is
when
you you spoke really eloquently about
the fact that
this there's this going back and forth
and now there's a feeling like you're
censoring a little bit too much
so i would lean i would try to be ahead
of that feeling i would now lean towards
freedom of speech and say you know we're
not the ones that are going to define
misinformation uh let it be a public
debate
let the idea stand and i i actually
place you know this idea misinformation
i place the responsibility
on the poor communication skills of
scientists
they should be in the battlefield of
ideas and everybody who is uh
spreading information against the
vaccine
they should not be censored they should
be talked with and you should show the
data you should have open discussion as
opposed to rolling your eyes and saying
i'm the expert i know what i'm talking
about no you need to convince people
it's a battle of ideas so that's the
whole point of freedom of speech it's
the way to defeat bad ideas is with with
good ideas with speech
um so like the responsibility here falls
on the
poor uh communication skills of
scientists
thanks tim social media
um
scientists are not communicators they
have the power to communicate some of
the best stuff i've seen about covenant
from doctors is on social media it's a
way to learn to respond really quickly
to go faster than the peer review
process and so they just need to get way
better at that communication and also by
better i don't mean just
convincing i also mean speak with
humility don't talk down to people all
those kinds of things and as a platform
i would say
i would step
back a little bit
not all the way of course because
there's a lot of stuff that can cause
real harm as we've talked about but you
lean more towards freedom of speech
because then people
from a brand perspective wouldn't be
blaming you for the other ills of
society
which there are many the institutions
have flaws
the political divide
obviously politicians have flaws that's
news
uh the the media has has flaws that
they're all trying to work
with and because of the central place of
facebook in the world
all of those flaws somehow kind of
propagate to facebook and you're sitting
there
the in
as plato the philosopher have to answer
to some of the most difficult
questions asking uh uh being asked of
human civilization so i don't know maybe
this is an american answer though to
lean towards freedom of speech i don't
know if that applies globally
so yeah i don't i don't know but
transparency and saying
i think as a technologist one of the
things i sense about facebook and matter
when people talk about
this company is they don't
necessarily understand fully how
difficult the problem is you talked
about ai has to catch a bunch of harmful
stuff
really quickly just the sea of data you
have to deal with
it's a really difficult problem so like
any of the critics if you just hand them
the helm
for a week
let's see how well you can do
like that to me that that's definitely
something that
would wake people up to how difficult
this problem is if there's more
transparency saying how difficult this
problem is
let me ask you about on the ai front
just because you mentioned
uh language and my in eloquence um the
translation is something i wanted to ask
you about and uh first just to give a
shout out to the super computer you've
recently announced the ai research
supercluster rsc
obviously i'm somebody who loves the
gpus it currently has 6 000 gpus
nvidia gx a100s uh is is the systems
that have uh in total 6000 gpus and uh
it will eventually maybe this year maybe
soon we'll have 16 000 gpus so it can do
a bunch of different kinds of
machine learning applications there's a
cool thing
on the distributed storage aspect and
all that kind of stuff so one of the
applications that i think is super
exciting is translation
real-time translation i mentioned to you
that you know having a conversation i
speak russian fluently i speak english
somewhat fluently and i'm you know
having a conversation with vladimir
putin say as a use case me as a user
coming to you in the use case
we both speak
each other's language i speak russian he
speaks english
how can we have that communication go
well with the help of ai i think it's
such a beautiful and a powerful
application of ai to connect the world
that bridge the gap not necessarily
between me and putin but
people that don't have that shared
language
can you just speak about your vision
with translation because i think that's
a really exciting application
if you're trying to help people connect
all around the world
you know a lot of content is produced in
one language and people and all these
other places are interested in it so
being able to translate that
um just unlocks a lot of value on a
day-to-day basis
and so the the kind of ai
around translation is interesting
because it's gone through a bunch of
um a bunch of iterations but the basic
state of the art
is that
you don't want to go through
you know different kind of
um you know intermediate symbolic
um
representations of of of language or
something like that it's you basically
want to be able to
map
the the concepts and basically go
directly from one language to another
and you just can train
um bigger and bigger models in order to
be able to do that and that's where the
the um the research supercluster comes
in is basically a lot of the trend in in
in machine learning is just you're
building bigger and bigger models and
you just need a lot of computation to
train them so it's not that like
the translation would run on the
supercomputer the training of the model
um
which could have you know billions or
trillions of examples of you know just
basically that um you're you're training
models on this super cluster in
you know days or weeks that might take
um a much longer period of time on a
smaller cluster so it just wouldn't be
practical for most teams to do but the
the translation work
um
we we're basically getting from
you know being able to go between about
100 languages seamlessly today
um
to being able to go to about 300
languages
in the near term and so from any
language to any other language yeah then
that's and and part of the issue when
you get closer to you know
more languages is
some of these get to be you know pretty
um
very popular languages right where there
isn't that much content in them so um so
you you end up having less data and you
need to kind of use
a model that you've built up around
other examples and this is one of the
big questions around ai is like how
generalizable can things be um and and
that's that i think is one of the things
that's just kind of exciting here from a
technical perspective but capturing we
talked about this with the metaverse
capturing the magic of human human
interaction so me and putin okay i'm
again this is i mean it's a tough
example because you actually both speak
russian and english but that's but in
the future i see it as a touring test of
a kind because we would both like to
have an ai that improves because i don't
speak russian that well he doesn't speak
english that well yeah it would be nice
to outperform our abilities
it sets a really nice bar because i
think ai can really help in translation
for people that don't speak the language
at all but to actually capture the magic
of the chemistry the translation which
would make the metaverse
super immersive
that's exciting you remove the barrier
of language period
yeah so
when people think about translation i
think a lot of that is they're thinking
about text to text but
speech to speech i think is a whole
nother thing and i mean one of the big
lessons on that which i was referring to
before is i think early models it's like
all right they take speech they
translate it to text translate the text
to another language and then and then
kind of output that as speech in that
language and you don't want to do that
you just want to be able to go directly
from speech in one language to speech in
another language and build up the models
to to do that and
i mean i think one of the
there have been
when you look at the progress in machine
learning there have been
big advances in the techniques
um you know some of the
the uh advances in self-supervised
learning which i know you talked to jan
about and he's like one of the leading
thinkers in this area i just think that
that stuff is really exciting but then
you couple that with the ability to just
throw larger and larger amounts of
compute at training these models
and you can just do a lot of things that
um that that uh
were harder to do before but we're
asking more of um of our systems too
right so you know if you think about the
applications that we're gonna need
for the metaverse um or think about it
okay so let's talk about ar here for a
second you're gonna have these glasses
they're gonna look
hopefully like a normal-ish looking pair
of glasses um but they're gonna be able
to
put holograms in the world and intermix
virtual and physical objects in in your
in your scene and one of the things
that's going to be unique
about this compared to every other
computing device that you've had before
is that this is going to be the first
computing device
that has all the same signals about
what's going on around you that you have
where it's your phone you can i mean you
can you can have it take a photo or a
video
but i mean these glasses are gonna you
know whenever you activate them they're
gonna be able to see what you see from
your perspective they're gonna be able
to hear what you hear because they're
the microphones and all that are gonna
be right around where your ears are so
you're gonna want an ai assistant that's
a new kind of ai assistant
that
can basically help you process the world
from this first person perspective or
from the perspective that you have and
the utility of that is going to be huge
but
the kinds of ai models that we're going
to need are going to be
just um
i don't know there's a lot that we're
going to need to basically make advances
in but i mean but that's why i think
these concepts of the metaverse and and
and the advances in ai are so
fundamentally interlinked um
that i mean they're they're kind of
enabling each other yeah like the world
builder is a really cool idea like uh
you can be like a bob ross like i'm
gonna i'm gonna put a little tree right
here yeah i need a little treat it's
missing a little tree and then but at
scale like
enriching your experience in all kinds
of ways you mentioned the assistant too
that's really interesting how you can
have ai assistance helping you out on
different levels of sort of intimacy of
communication it could be just like
scheduling or it could be like almost
like therapy
clearly i need some uh so let me ask you
you're one of the most successful people
ever
you've built an incredible company
that has
a lot of impact what advice do you have
for young people
today
how to live a life they can be proud of
how to how to build something that can
um have a big positive impact on the
world
well
let's break that down because i think
you
proud of have a big positive impact well
you're actually listening and how to
live your life are actually three
different things that um that i think
i mean they could line up but um
and also like what age of people are you
talking to because i mean i can like
high school and college so you don't
really know what you're doing but you
dream big
and you really have a chance to to do
something unprecedented yeah
so
for people my age okay so let's maybe
maybe start with the the kind of most
philosophical and abstract version of
this yes every night when i put my
daughters
to bed
we we go through this thing and like
they call it the good night things
because we're we're basically
what we talk about at night um and
and
i i just i
go through them sounds like a good show
that's the good night things yeah
priscilla's always asking she's like can
i get good night things like i don't
know you go to bed too early um but it's
um
it's
but i basically go through with max and
and and auggie um
you know what are the the things that
are most important in life right that i
just it's like what do i want them to
remember and just have like really
ingrained in them as they grow up and
it's
health
right making sure that you take care of
of yourself and keep yourself in good
shape
loving friends and family
right because you know having the the
relationships the the family and making
time for
for for friends i think is
is um
perhaps one of the most important things
um and then the third is maybe a little
more amorphous but it is
something that you're excited about for
the future and when i'm talking to a
four-year-old often i'll ask her what
she's excited about for tomorrow or the
week ahead but i think for
for most people it's really hard
i mean the world is a heavy place and i
think like the the way that we navigate
it is that we have things that we're
looking forward to so whether it is
building ar glasses for the future or
um being able to celebrate my 10-year
wedding anniversary with with my wife
that's coming up it's like i think
people
you know you have things that you're
looking forward to um or for the girls
it's often i want to see mom in the
morning right it's like just but it's
like that's a really critical thing and
then the last thing is i ask them every
day what did you do today to help
someone
um
because i just think that that's that's
a really critical thing is like
like it's it's easy to kind of get
caught up in yourself and um and and
kind of stuff that's really far down the
road but
like did you do something just concrete
today to help someone and you know it
can just be as simple as okay yeah um i
helped set the table for lunch right or
you know this other kid in our school
was having a hard time with something
and i like helped explain it to him but
um but those are that's sort of like
if you were to boil down my overall life
philosophy into what i try to impart to
my my kids
um those are the things that i think are
really important so okay so let's say
college so if you're graduating college
probably more practical advice
um
so i'm always very focused on people and
i think the most important decision
you're probably going to make if you're
in college
is who you surround yourself with
because you become like the people you
surround yourself with
and
i i sort of have
this hiring heuristic at meta
which is that i will only hire someone
to work for me
if
i could see myself working for them not
necessarily that i want them to run the
company because i like my job but like
but but in an alternate universe if it
was their company and i was looking to
to go work somewhere um would i be happy
to work for them and i think that
that's a helpful heuristic
to help balance you know when you're
building something like this there's a
lot of pressure to you know you want to
build out your teams because there's a
lot of stuff that you need to get done
and then everyone always says don't
compromise on quality but there's this
question of okay how do you know that
someone is good enough and i think my
answer is
i would want someone to be to be on my
team if i would work for them
but i think it's actually a pretty
similar answer
to like
if you were gonna go if you were
choosing friends or a partner or
something like that so when you're kind
of in college trying to figure out what
your circle is going to be trying to
figure out you know you're evaluating
different job opportunities um
who are the people even if they're going
to be peers and and what you're doing
who are the people who in an alternate
university you would want to work for
them because you think you're going to
learn a lot from them because they know
because they they are kind of values
aligned on the things that you care
about and they're going to like um and
they're going to push you but also they
know different things and have different
experiences that that are kind of more
of what you want to become like over
time so i don't know i think probably
people are too
in general objective focused and maybe
not focused enough on
the connections and
the people who they're who they're
basically building relationships with i
don't know what it says about me but my
place in austin now has um
seven legged robots so i'm surrounding
myself by robots which
is probably something i should look into
um what kind of world would you like to
see your daughters grow up in
even after you're gone
well i think one of the promises of all
the stuff that is getting built now
is that
it can be a world where more people have
can just live out their imagination but
one of my favorite quotes it's i think
it was a tribute to picasso it's that
all children are artists and the
challenge is how do you remain one when
you grow up and i mean it's like if you
have kids you
that's pretty clear i mean they just
like have wonderful imaginations and
part of what what i think is going to be
great about the creator economy and the
metaverse and all this stuff is like
this notion around
that a lot more people in the future are
going to get to work doing creative
stuff
than what i think today we would just
consider traditional labor or service
and
i think that that's awesome
and like
and that that's like what a lot of what
people are here to do is like
collaborate together work together um
think of things that you want to build
um and go do it and um
i don't know one of the things that i
just think is striking so i like i teach
my my daughters
like some basic coding with scratch i
mean they're they're still obviously
really young but um you know i think of
coding as building where it's like when
i'm when i'm coding i'm like building
something that i want to exist
but
my my youngest daughter
um
you know she's very musical and and and
pretty artistic and she thinks about
coding
as art she calls it code art not the
code
but the output of what she is making
it's like she's just very interesting
visually and what she can kind of output
and how it can move around
and
do we need to fix that are we good what
happened
um do we have to clap yeah alexa yes i
was just talking about you know auggie
and her code art but
i mean to me this is like a beautiful
thing right that the notion that like
for me coding was this functional thing
and i enjoyed it and it like helped
build something utilitarian but that for
the next generation of people it will be
even more a an expression of their kind
of imagination and artistic
um sense for what they want to exist so
i don't know if that happens if we can
help bring about
this world where
you know a lot more people can that
that's like their existence going
forward is being able to basically
create and
and live out
you know all these different kinds of
art i just think that that's like a
beautiful and wonderful thing and will
be very freeing for humanity to spend
more of our time on the things that
matter to us yeah allow more and more
people to express their art and the full
meaning of that word yeah that's a
beautiful vision uh we mentioned that
you are
mortal are you afraid of death do you
think about your mortality
and are you afraid of it
you didn't sign up for this on a podcast
no i mean that's it's an interesting
question i
i mean i'm definitely aware of it i um
i do a fair amount of like
extreme sport type stuff so
um
so like so i'm definitely aware of it
yeah um
and i and you're flirting with it a bit
like
extreme i train hard i mean so it's like
if i'm gonna go out in like
yeah a 15-foot wave go up big then well
then it's like all right i'll make sure
we have the right safety gear and like
make sure that i'm like used to that
spot and and all that stuff but like
but you know i mean you the risk is
still there it takes some head blows
along the way yes um
but
definitely aware of it
definitely would like to stay safe i
have a lot of stuff that i
want to build and want to does it freak
you out that it's finite though
that there's a deadline when it's all
over
and there'll be a time when your
daughter's around and you're gone
i don't know that doesn't freak me out i
think
constraints are helpful
yeah
yeah the finiteness is uh makes makes
ice cream taste more delicious somehow
the fact that it's going to be over
there's something about that with the
metaverse too
you want we talked about this identity
earlier like having just one with like
nfts there's something powerful about
the the constraint of finiteness or
uniqueness
that this moment is singular in history
but i mean a lot of you know as you go
through different waves of technology i
think a lot of what is interesting is
what becomes
in practice infinite or or kind of there
can be many many of a thing and then
what ends up still being constrained so
the metaverse um
should hopefully allow
a very large number or maybe you know in
practice
hopefully close to an infinite amount of
expression and worlds and
but we'll still only have a finite
amount of time yes i i think
i mean living longer i think is good
i know obviously all of my
our philanthropic work is
it's it's not focused on longevity but
it is focused on trying to
achieve what i think is a possible goal
in this
century which is to be able to cure
prevent or manage all diseases
um so i certainly think people kind of
getting sick and dying is a bad thing
because i'm you know dedicating almost
all of my capital towards um advancing
research in that area to to push on that
which and we can do a whole another one
of these podcasts about that because
that's so what people should fascinating
topic i mean this is with with the web
priscilla chan you formed the chan
zuckerberg initiative gave away 99 or
pledged to give away 99 of facebook now
meta shares
i mean like you said we could talk
forever about ex all the exciting things
you're working on there including
the sort of
moonshot of eradicating disease
by the mid-century mark or i don't
actually know if you're gonna ever
eradicate it but i think you can get to
a point where you
um can either cure things that happened
right so people get diseases but you can
cure them prevent is pre closest to
eradication or just be able to manage as
sort of like ongoing things that are
um you know not gonna ruin your life
and i think that that's possible i think
saying that there's going to be no
disease at all
probably is not possible within the next
several decades basic thing is increase
the quality of life yeah and maybe uh
keep the finiteness because it tastes it
makes everything taste more delicious
yeah maybe that's just being a romantic
20th century human maybe but i mean but
it was an intentional decision to not
focus on our philanthropy on like
explicitly on longevity or living
forever yes
if at the moment of your death and by
the way i like that uh the lights went
out when we started talking about death
you get to uh does make it a lot more
dramatic it does
actually get closer to mike
at the moment of your death you get to
meet god
and you you get to ask one question what
question would you like to ask
or maybe a whole conversation i don't
know it's up to you
it's more dramatic when it's just one
question
well if it's only one question and i
died
i would just want to know that priscilla
and
my family
like if they were going to be okay
that might depend on
the circumstances of my death but i
think that in most circumstances that i
can think of that's probably the main
thing that i would care about
yeah i think god would hear that
question be like all right fine you get
in that's that's right that's the right
question is it is it i don't know
humility and selfishness
all right you're you're right i mean
but
well maybe you're gonna be fine don't
worry you can but i mean one of the
things that i think you str i struggle
with at least
is
on the one hand that's probably the most
the thing that's closest to me and maybe
the
most common
human experience but
i don't know one of the things that i
just struggle with in terms of running
this large
enterprise is like
should the thing that i care more about
be
that responsibility
and
i think it's shifted over time
i mean like before i really had a family
that was like the only thing i cared
about and
i
at this point it's i mean i'm
i mean i i care deeply about it but like
yeah i think that that's that's not as
obvious of a question yeah we humans are
weird you get you get you get this
ability to uh impact millions of lives
and it's definitely something billions
of lives
is something you care about but the the
the weird humans that are closest to us
those are the ones that um mean the most
and i suppose that's the dream of the
metaverse is to connect
form small groups like that where you
can have those intimate relationships
let me ask you the big ridiculous one to
be able to be close
not just based on who you happen to be
next to i think that's what the internet
is already doing is allowing you to
spend more of your time not physically
proximate
i mean i always think when you think
about the
the metaverse people ask this question
about the real world
it's like dude the virtual world versus
the real world it's like no the real
world
is a combination of the virtual world
and the physical world but i think over
time
as we get more
technology the physical world is
becoming less of a percent of the real
world
and
i think that that opens up a lot of
opportunities for people because you
know you can you can work in different
places you can
stay more close to stay closer to people
who are in different places yeah that's
good removing barriers of geography and
then barriers of language yeah that's
that's a beautiful vision
big ridiculous question what do you
think is the meaning of life
i think that well
there are probably a couple of different
ways that
that i would go at this but i think it
gets back to this last question that we
talked about about the duality between
you have
the people around you who you care the
most about and then
there's like this bigger thing that
maybe you're building
um
and i think that in my own life i mean i
i sort of think about this tension but
it's look i mean i started this whole
company and my life's work is around
human connection so
um
i think it's intellectually
probably
the thing that i go to first is just
that
human connection is the meaning
and i mean i think that it's a thing
that our
society probably
systematically undervalues i mean i just
remember you know when i was growing up
and in
in school it's like do your homework and
then go play with your friends after and
it's like no well what if what if
playing with your friends is the point
like that sounds like an argument your
daughter should make well i mean i don't
know i just i just think it doesn't even
matter man well i think it's interesting
because it's you know people
i think people tend to think about that
stuff as wasting time yeah or that's
like what you do in the free time that
you have but like what if that's
actually the point yeah so that's one
but but here's here's maybe a different
way of counting out this which is um
maybe more like religious in nature i
mean i always like
there's a
rabbi who i've studied with who who kind
of gave me this
we were talking through genesis and the
the bible and the torah and
um
[Music]
and they're basically walking through
it's like
okay you go through the the seven days
of of creation and
um
and
it's basically it's like why does the
bible start there
right it's like it could have started
anywhere right in terms of like how to
live
but
basically it starts with talking about
how god created people
in his her image
but the bible starts by talking about
how god created everything
so
i actually think that there's like
a
a compelling argument that i think i've
always just found meaningful and
inspiring that
a lot of the point
of what sort of religion
has been telling us that we should do
is to create
and build things
so these things are not necessarily at
odds i mean i think like
i mean that's and i think probably to
some degree you'd expect me to say
something like this because i've
dedicated my life to creating things
that help people connect so i mean
that's sort of the fusion of of um
i mean getting back to what we talked
about earlier it's i mean what i studied
in school is psychology and computer
science right so it's i mean these are
these are like the two themes that
that i care about um
but i don't know for me that's what
that's kind of what i think about that's
what matters to create and to uh
to love which is the ultimate form of
connection
i think this is one hell of an amazing
replay experience in the metaverse so
whoever is using our avatars uh
years from now i hope you had fun and
thank you for talking today
thank you thanks for listening to this
conversation with mark zuckerberg to
support this podcast please check out
our sponsors in the description
and now let me leave you with the end of
the poem if by raja kipling
if you can talk with crowds and keep
your virtue
or walk with kings or lose the common
touch
if neither foes nor loving friends can
hurt you
if all men count with you but none too
much
if you can fill the unforgiving minute
with 60 seconds worth of distance run
yours is the earth
and everything that's in it
and which is more you'll be a man my son
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you