Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #267
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 2016 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