lot of people just get upset if you dare to question
if Apple is going to lead in a new space. we're a company that moves pretty quickly. So I actually think
we'll probably move faster. one of the wilder things that
we're working is this neural interface. mean like a chip that you jack into
your brain. wouldn't want to use version
one of that, mom actually bet me
that I was going to drop out of college. in a good way or a bad way? And way to college.
She said, You're going to drop out. I mean th
e whole meat thing fascination
to for a long time. Yeah. sweet baby Ray's just sitting out here
with friends, smoking meats, you know, it's. Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, good to see you guys.
Good to see you as well. All right. Let us jump right in on Tuesday,
you posted a video to Instagram where you reviewed the Apple Vision
Pro, a competing headset, and compared it to your own
The Quest three, what we're all wondering is
why did you decide to make that video? You know, having a CEO publicl
y review
a rival product isn't exactly typical. You know, the CEO of Papa John's
isn't going over to Domino's and eating their pizza. man. Well, I mean, look, in my household, it's
basically like my wife, Priscilla, screaming at me to like
it's like, ma, come come to sleep. And I'm like,
no, there's someone wrong on the Internet. You got to got to do something about this. So, yeah, I mean, that's
that's kind of the the daily. But no, for real though,
I mean, you know basically going into I hadn'
t tried the vision Pro
for a while, right? I mean Apple wasn't like in a rush
to to give me one. But going into that, you know I sort of expected
that for a device, though. I mean, their device is $3,500. Ours is $500. I kind of thought, okay, there's would be
better but a bunch of things than ours. But ours would still be the better value for most people
given that seven times less expensive. But when I actually got a chance
to try theirs out, I was like, Wow, it's actually ours isn't just the
better
value, it's the better product, you know? And and I think that, you know,
I just saw the media coverage around this was just sort of breathlessly assuming
that, you know, I think because it's Apple and because it was such
an expensive product like it must be,
you know, the better one in quality, even though a lot of people are saying,
hey, no, you should go buy Quest three
because it's a it's a better price. And I just wanted
to kind of put my flag down and say, hey, no, you know, just be
cause this thing
costs seven times more, it doesn't mean it's better if you actually go
use case by use case on this thing. QUEST Three stacks up really well. And I'm just really proud of the work
that we did. So I just kind of wanted to put that out
there and say that it was definitely you. You flex on them a little bit. You brought the receipts on some level,
though, you do have to be a little pleased that Apple is getting into this space because, well,
everyone is talking about headsets now.
They weren't as much this time last year. Do you think you're benefiting
from this apple halo effect? Well, I mean, I think competition is does
end up being good for people. I mean, I'm a very competitive person. So, I mean, having a competitor who's
doing a good job will also motivate us. And and it's good for the teams. It creates more of a sense of urgency. So I do think that, you know, people
really win when there's competition. And I definitely think that
that's that's true. And yeah,
I mea
n, I do think that because people sort of assume
that if Apple comes into a space, they're going to do a good job, then
it's okay. You know, maybe I hadn't considered wearing one of these headsets
and now I will. And, you know, hey, the Quest three is actually better
and it's $500, so I'll go for that one. I do think a lot of people
are going to buy Quest because of that. So that's going to be going
to be a pretty exciting thing. But I don't know.
I mean, we're in this for the long term. I think
it's going to be into
there can be a lot of ups and downs. You know, just so I mean, I don't worry
too much about any given year. I just try to,
you know, do the best stuff that we can. I mean, speaking of a given year, I do
want to take it back to 2007 for a second. There is this infamous
Steve Ballmer interview where he literally laughs at the iPhone
after its introduction because he thought it was way too expensive. It didn't have a keyboard gasp and he said
it would never really gain market
share. Are you at all nervous that when you start
comparing a product from Apple that is less than a month old to your product,
which has ten plus years of development behind it,
that you might be making the same laughing at the iPhone
like Steve Ballmer type mistake? I don't think so. I mean, look,
first of all, I'm not laughing at them. I mean, I take Apple seriously. I think it's like a good company.
They do good work. I mean, I'm just laying out the facts
as I see them today. I'm not saying
that they're not going to improve, but hey, we're going to improve, too. And, you know,
we're a company that moves pretty quickly. So I actually think
we'll probably move faster. But I do think that there's
this whole vibe with Apple fanboys, which I find kind of a little funny and,
you know, where it's like a lot of people just get upset if you dare to question
if Apple is going to lead in a new space. And I don't know. I mean, I just think
if you look at the history of computing, you know, ev
ery major
generation has sort of an open model where it's more partnership oriented,
more favorable to developers, and then they have a closed model
where it's just like, you know, it's usually just Apple
basically just integrating all their stuff closely together. And yeah, in Mobile, Apple one, I mean, there's technically more
Android phones out there, but you know basically Apple if a business perspective one
and then all the developed countries where people could afford their products
I mean
people basically prefer the iPhone but that's not the way it always works,
right? The PC is before that, you know,
in the nineties, you know, Microsoft and Windows were really the leader
and they had the open model. So I just don't think that the future
is written on this yet. And I think that for this next generation, Apple
is clearly going to be the closed model. You know, meta in our approach
is going to be more open and partnership
oriented, more developer focused. And, you know, I think we
have
a really good chance at winning. And I I'm really committed to doing that. I mean, I'm like a
you know, I'm a competitive person. I'm like passionate about what we're doing
and like, we're playing to win. So no, I mean, you know, it's
I can't like sit here and guarantee that the future will go
one way or another. But I think people who will who try to say
that there's no chance that it goes the other way are just wrong. Look, I think that this is
this is an open game. And and I feel pretty
good about the team
and the effort and the products that we're putting out. Apple fanboys have been put on notice. Absolutely. And we know you're
a competitive person, too, and we're going to get to
that later in the show. But I do want to talk about Neil and I's
personal experience with The Quest three. We actually tried it on yesterday. I had a great time while I was in it,
but as soon as I took it off and looked at Neil across the room,
kind of waving his arms around it, he was playing Beat
Saber at one point
and I thought to myself, Wow, this is pretty socially
isolating, actually, if you're not physically wearing it,
is this the future that you or that you think
consumers and people really want? Well, I think that there's a mix. I mean, we do spend a lot of time
in front of our computers today. You know, it's
I think that there's a space for, you know, having a big TV or an
entertainment station in your living room where you kind of do immersive things
for hours at a time, like p
lay games. I think that that that is the thing
that I think people want. But, you know, when I see these videos
of people like wearing these devices walking down the street,
that is not what we're designing this for. I do think that there's going to be
a mobile version in this next in this next generation of computing,
and that's more going to be glasses. And we're getting started on that
with the Ray-Ban meta smart glasses that we put out
that are doing really well. You know, it's the second ge
neration
that we just put out. It's,
you know, we have met the eye and there is a lot of really exciting use case. So I'm really excited to roll out the, the multi-modal part of that
which which basically in a I speak is like you can ask a questions
using both the camera. So it's like look at look at what's around
and you can speak to it. So, you know,
we have people doing stuff like, you know, going for a walking tour around
Stanford campus and just like look at a building
and they just ask the
glasses like, Hey, look, and tell me
what is the significance of this building? And the history behind it? Okay,
What about this sculpture that's here? Tell me about that. And I mean, just that's like pretty wild
and and can be more social stuff and I think is is more the thing that
you're going to see more out in the world. But I mean yeah look people do
spend many hours in front of, you know, in front of their big screens
today either either doing entertainment
or productivity type things. An
d, you know, increasingly even fitness
oriented devices with things like Peloton or,
you know, big screen component of that. So will the future involve
those activities? But in a more immersive version of that? Yeah, I think so. And I think part of what we need to do
is make that social right. So part of it is the mixed reality. So you can see the, the physical world around you
and blend the digital objects into that. That's a big part of what we did that that was the
there was the big jump from
Quest two to Quest three is now we have this high
resolution color mixed reality passthrough so you can see the world around you
and put digital objects there. But, you know, a big focus for us
when I talk about the metaverse, it is about that kind of social sense of presence
and being there with other people, which is something
that we kind of designed into our products to make them all
sort of multiplayer and social. And I just think I mean, I mean,
that's like the DNA of our company. So like
, you know,
we're going to really focus on that. That's an area where I think
we'll do the best work in the industry. So in your ideal world,
someone would be using the Quest headset in their home
and then wear out the glasses. Is is that kind of the relationship
between those two? Yeah. I mean,
I think that you can think of the glasses as the next computing generation's
phone, right? It's the it's the mobile. Truly. You're using it on the go
computing platform, whereas
I think the headset is go
ing to be more the next generation's
computer or TV screen. So the bigger screens that you have. And yeah, I mean, I think for most people
the phone is probably the more important device in their life. And I think that that's probably
going to be true in this next generation,
that the glasses are probably going to be the more important
and more ubiquitous thing. But I think that they're both meaningful. And I also think technologically
there's a path where you want to build kind of this immersiv
e kind of 3D content and you can build
it first in mixed reality because the devices, by virtue of the fact
that they're a bit bigger, have more compute. So so it's easier to build stuff there. And then by the time we get to glasses
that can put holograms in the world, we'll have built up the whole kind of developer ecosystem and platform
to have a bunch of the content there. But the thing that
I think has been really cool is, you know, I kind of thought
that smart glasses weren't going to be a
like, ubiquitous consumer product
until we got to that kind of hologram and putting, you know, digital objects, you know, just
overlaying them physically on the world. But then this kind of crazy thing
happened in the last year, which is this emergence of these
these A.I. models, right. Where you can talk to them
and ask ask questions and and, you know,
they can do a lot of things for you. So now I actually think that something
like the Ray-Ban Metta Smart Glasses is going to have much broader a
ppeal than I would have guessed
even a few years ago. I mean, we sort of when we started that,
we thought of it as like the kind of intro project
working our way up towards towards holograms, where whereas
now I actually think a lot of people are just going to want that right here
because, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's a it's an affordable
product, It's a stylish product. It's like you don't need to cram
a ton of technology into it. You can just like, yeah,
it's like it has cameras, it ha
s speakers. There's a microphone
you can talk to AI, It's you can take phone calls on it, you can listen to audiobooks
while you're out there. It's, you know, it's just pretty,
pretty capable already, right? Many, many people in the tech industry
have been questioning whether A.I. will render the end of the smartphone
and the building. They're building these different hardware
gadgets from a pen to peppers. Little thing. I don't even know
how you would describe it, but. But you think that these
smartphone,
because of AI will replace or I'm sorry,
the glasses will replace a smartphone? Well, I guess maybe I should clarify that. I think what tends to happen
is that the last generation of computing doesn't go away where it's not like when we got phones,
like people stopped using computers. But you do shift in terms of use, right? So like before, we probably used computers
more than we got phones. Now I do a lot of stuff on my phone today
that I would have done on my computer before,
and t
hat's clearly the primary thing. So what I think is going to happen is that glasses are going to become
the primary mobile device. I'm not predicting that in ten years. Like we're not also going to have phones. I just think that like a lot of the time,
they're going to sit in our pocket when we're just doing stuff
that we could do more naturally and in a more socially good way
with with glasses, without having to, you know, have something in your hand
or like take your your kind of eyes away fro
m the interaction they were having
and look down at a at a phone. So but I'm not
I'm certainly not predicting the kind of complete disappearance of phones. I think that that that's not in the cards
I think anytime soon. And and to some degree
I think the glasses will interact with the phone because, you know,
if you're if you're asking the glasses a question,
the eye basically connects to the phone and then uses the phone's connection
to the Internet to then talk to to our infrastructure,
to ask
the question and get it resolved. So we're kind of betting that you will have a phone,
you will just take it out a lot less. I've been so surprised to see the creator kind of economy
embrace this product as well. I don't know if you saw the trend
that went pretty viral on TikTok of people kind of dancing around while wearing the glasses
that are completely organic, by the way. And I was just surprised to see them kind of immediately
glom onto this new piece of technology and immediately
integra
te it into their content. Were you surprised about that,
or is that the goal all along? Well, it's always awesome to see. And, you know, I mean, my history in like where I come from, I'm a more like a
like an engineer, right? It builds software. So building stylish
hardware is relatively new for me, right? I mean, that's not like Mark. You've got a quiet luxury vibe, too. You give yourself some credit. Okay? I, I, I appreciate that, but I bet that's wearing other people's stuff. But, you know, i
t's don't get me wrong,
I have a lot of confidence. I do believe that, like, you know,
given enough iterations, I can I can I can I can I can get there on building
the stuff that we want to. But for this one,
we did something different, which is we worked with Ray-Ban,
all right? And, you know, they're like, you know,
the company that builds the Ray-Bans is the leading, you know, fashion
and kind of glasses company in the world. So they do great work on style and luxury,
which it's really been a
very fascinating partnership. I mean, the technology behind
even producing kind of normal glasses before you put any electronics
in, it is actually quite sophisticated. And, you know, we've learned a lot about working with them, about
how do you integrate kind of this new consumer electronics
technology with all the technology that goes into creating,
like really sophisticated lenses and and making it so that the the materials in the
in the glasses feel premium but are light. So there's all thi
s stuff
that I think like neither one company
could have done on their own. But through this partnership,
I think we've produced something that like brings state
of the art technology around a guy with something
that has been a fashion icon for decades. And I think it's pretty neat that, yeah,
I mean, it's so I mean, I don't know, it's it's tough for me to predict
exactly what the uptake would be, but but it's
I mean, it's not that out of the question. I think a lot of that is because,
you know,
the design is really nice. Okay. I do want to transition to a pretty
under the radar topic right now. We've mentioned a few times already on the show
and that is artificial intelligence. On your most recent earnings call,
the phrase A.I. was mentioned 70 times versus just seven
for the metaverse. You changed your company name to Meta and
you keep saying you're not creating A.I. and the metaverse, but it still feels like that's
where the industry focus is right now. The metaverse feels pretty 20
22 right now. How much did your strategy shift
after I kind of blew up when chatting about was released? Well, you know, we've been working on A.I. and the metaverse for for a long time. I mean, those have been the two major
kind of big tech bets for for the company for like a decade. And, you know,
the reality is, is that we're spending if you just look at how much
we're investing, it's like $15 billion a year at least into each of them. So, yeah, I mean, what we talk about
will vary at differe
nt points. And yeah, like what what we see
happening in the industry, what will help sharpen our product strategy and
and our sense of what we can be building right now. I definitely think where we are
in the hype cycle is much more, you know, people want to talk about A.I. whereas you know, yeah, in like in 21, 22, I think people are pretty excited
about the talking about the metaverse. Now. I think we're in this mode
where people are waiting for the products to get like more fully adopted, but
like we're just kind of quietly churning and building this stuff in the background. Like I don't care that much
whether something is cool one year or not. But yeah, I mean, at a moment
when people have more questions about the AI work that we're doing, I think it's natural that you'll hear me
be talking more about A.I. when when the metaverse space
heats up a bit. You know, are people
try to call it different things because they want to embrace
our branding around this. But but it's
but when th
at when that kind of heats up, then,
you know, you go through these moments where now we're talking about our
AR headsets or that stuff more. So I just think this will kind of go back and forth
a little bit over the next several years. But the reality is, is that these have been huge focuses for a while
and and I think are yeah. Going to continue to be for like the next decade or so until these things
both reach their full potential. Let's talk about Sam Altman
a bit, the open air CEO. He's been
reportedly
trying to raise $7 trillion to build the semiconductor infrastructure needed
to power artificial intelligence systems. And video CEO said this week
that Altman's plan was overkill. But what do you think? Is Sam insane or is this scale of investment
needed to support the development of AI? I don't know. I mean, Sam is is I think actually
like a very earnest and thoughtful guy. And I think his his level of ambition
for the space I think has been very helpful for
for building it out ove
rall. And I mean, the number is astronomical. So, I mean, it's it is hard to kind of
wrap my head around that, but honestly, I haven't gotten a chance
to talk to Sam about it. So I don't I don't want to weigh
in, weigh in too much on that. But I think the place that he's right
is that like, you know, if you look over year, these companies
keep on building these larger and larger training clusters of computers to basically train
the state of the art models. So it's like a couple of years ago, may
be it was like a thousand chips
that you kind of wired together. Then it's 10,000, then it's 100,000. You know, at some point it's
going to be a million, right? And then it's like at some point,
okay, yeah, you really need to produce a ton
of chips. So at that point, I don't think he is crazy. I don't know what it will take
to kind of accelerate all of this to to the point where kind of the technological curve can keep up. But I think that this is one of these
things where like building software
sometimes hits roadblocks
when you get into physical stuff. Right. Right. And all the stuff that we do, it's like
when we're building the apps, right? You're building like Instagram
or WhatsApp or Facebook. You know,
we can just ship updates like every week. But when we're building
like a new headset, it's like, okay, we work on that for two years
and we ship one headset, right? And then we work on another one
for two years, ship another headset. It just that the cycle time is slower. So I thin
k the software part of
AI will probably want to move fast, but I think at some point Sam is right that we're going to run
into some physical constraints on like how many chips can you churn out
and you know, how much power you need from like power plants
to be able to train the next bigger model. And I don't know, I think it is worth
thinking about how to how to alleviate some of those constraints,
because I think it's just going to enable and this technology's going to enable
all these awesome
use cases that I think are going to make our lives better
in so many ways. I do just want to get into kind
of the philosophical argument around AI a little bit. On one side of the spectrum,
you have people who think that it's got the potential
to kind of wipe out humanity, and we should hit pause
on the most advanced systems. And on the other hand, you have the Mark
Indonesians of the world who said stopping AI investment is literally akin to murder
because it would prevent valuable
breakthrough
s in the health care space. Where do you kind
of fall on that continuum? Well, I'm really focused on open source, which is I'm not sure exactly
where would fit on the continuum. But my theory of this
is that what you want to prevent is like one organization from getting like way more advanced
and powerful than everyone else. Here's like one thought experiment
is okay, like every year kind of security folks
and are figuring out what are all these bugs in our software
that can get exploited if you
don't do
these security updates, right? It's like everyone who's using, you know, any modern technology is constantly doing
security updates and updates for stuff. So if you could go back ten years in time
and kind of know all the bugs that would exist, then like any given organization
would basically be able to like, exploit everyone else.
And that would be bad, right? It would be bad if someone was way
more advanced than than everyone else in the world, because it could lead to
some like real
ly uneven outcomes. And the way that the industry
has tended to deal with this is by making a lot of infrastructure
open source so that way it can just get rolled out
and every piece of software can kind of get incrementally
a little bit stronger and safer together. So that's the case that I worry about
for the future. It's not like I mean,
you don't want to write off the, the, you know, potential
that like there's some runaway thing. But right now I don't see it.
I don't see it anytime soon. Th
e thing that I worry about more
sociologically is just like one organization
basically having some like really super intelligent capability
that isn't broadly shared. And I think the way you get around
that is by open sourcing it, which is what we do. And the reason why we can do that is because we don't have a business model
to sell it, right? So if you're if you're Google
or you're open, I right. I mean, this stuff is expensive
to build the business model that they have is they
they kind of bu
ild a model. They they fund it, they sell access to it. So they kind of need to keep it closed. And it's not I mean, it's not their fault. I just think that that's like
where the business model has led them. But we're kind of in a different zone. I mean, we're not selling access to the stuff, we're building models,
then using it as an ingredient to build our products,
whether it's like the Ray-Ban glasses or, you know, an AI assistant
across our software or, you know, eventually AI tools for cre
ators
that everyone's going to build to use to kind of like let your community engage with you
when, when, when you can engage with them
and things like that. And so open sourcing that actually fits
really well with our model. But that's that's
kind of my theory of the case is that is that yeah, this is going to do
a lot more good than harm and the bigger harms are basically
from having the system either not be widely or evenly deployed
or not hardened enough, which is the other thing is open so
urce software tends to be more secure
historically because you make it open
source, it's more widely available so more people can kind of poke holes on it
and then you have to fix the holes. So I think that this is the best bet
for keeping it safe over time. And part of the reason
why we're pushing in this direction. I love your take on AI in the job market. You know, there's a lot of anxiety
among people that I could replace them, especially with all the tech layoffs
of the last few years. And
then companies signaling
huge investments in AI. From your point of view, as the person
who is literally building these systems, say I'm the average white collar employee
working in professional services as an accountant say, should I be worried? Like, should I pivot my career
to become a chat bot, prompt engineer or whatever? I'm not sure I'd pivot my career yet. I mean, look, there's a lot more
you're saying over the long term, I'm actually quite bullish
that all these tools will give more peo
ple the potential
to kind of do what they care about, right? It's like when I see my kids, it's like,
you know, they they want to do all this creative stuff
and then we're like going broccoli. Right? And I do think that they, like a lot of people I think maybe are not in the jobs that they would
like ideally want to be in. And I think in the future we'll just have the capacity
to to do more of that. So I think that that's that
is is the long term. But then there's always the question of
how do y
ou get there? And yeah, I think that there will be
a bunch of transformation that will mean that certain jobs we don't do them
in the way that we're doing them now. Certain things might get automated,
but I don't know. I just think that the limit
to human ingenuity, I don't know. It's either
kind of limitless or extremely high. And I just don't think we're anywhere near
kind of fulfilling that potential yet. So I'm much more optimistic about that in
terms of the layoffs and stuff like that. I ac
tually think that that was more due to companies
trying to navigate COVID in the pandemic. And I mean, it was sort of this weird
wave where, you know, it's you know, at first we saw e-commerce go through the roof
and it's like, okay, yeah, because a lot of people aren't going out
and physically shopping. But it was it was really hard to predict. Okay. Are you like, is that going to continue? Is like all this e-commerce just better than physical shopping
or like what's the balance after? And I th
ink across the the economy,
a lot of companies just kind of overbuilt And then when when things went back
to pretty close to exactly the way they were before it, I think a lot of companies
realized, hey, we're kind of not in a good financial place
because we overbuilt. And then so you had this wave of layoffs that were basically responding to that. But then you also had this generation of
companies that knew nothing except growth. So the idea of like doing
layoffs was just like, no, this is craz
y. Like, we couldn't even comprehend that. But then they had to do it. And then I think a lot of companies went through the zone of thinking, Hey,
you know, that actually it didn't. And the company
was obviously really tough. We parted with a lot of talented people
that we cared about, but in some ways, actually becoming leaner kind of makes
the companies more effective. So now I think that there's
another kind of way of that a bunch of companies are going to
I and we did this last year, but I t
hink some companies are are kind of still in this
in this mode of of thinking, okay, well we're thinking about like how efficient
and lean we should be. Maybe we should be
a somewhat different shape than we are now to do the best work that we can. But I don't think that that at least for us, it was not you know,
the stuff was not a major driver of that. It was it was like first it just kind of this overbuilding
and then the sense of like, let's do the best work that we can
by making a lean compa
ny is lean as you can be for,
you know, our scale. It just yeah it does
feel like the layoffs of early 2024 do have some this AI tinge to it. It's not, it's
not the back to normal COVID stuff because when you listen
to these CEOs on their earnings calls and when they're doing the layoff
announcements, it's more a strategic reorganizing of their focus,
where they're investing more in AI. And they're not saying I'm laying you off
because of that, but it's just a trimming of certain departments
and
they're hiring in others. So to me, I feel like the
this wave of layoffs is a little bit different than the ones coming out of like
early 2023. I like yours, but yeah, that's possible. I mean, maybe I mean, I'm just mostly commenting on what I see in our company
and sort of our our kind of peers and the companies
around me in the tech industry. But there's certainly broader stuff. So I would just
maybe I'm not seeing that one as clearly. Yeah, Last question on. I hear you have a lot of listener
s
who have may have only interacted
with AI on a very limited basis. If you wanted to blow their minds, delight
their imaginations, what would you show them right now? How would you exemplify the power of
AI to someone who hasn't really experienced it so far? I mean, I think the Ray-Ban glasses
are going to enable like already do and will enable
some pretty mindblowing things. And I think people always tend to think
that these physical kind of manifestations of things are more
impressive than ju
st the software only. So I think having glasses
that can see what you see here, where you hear, you can ask it questions
about what's going on around you. I do think the ability to, like I was saying, like walk around
through some kind of historic place and just ask it to like
look at stuff like, explain to me
what what matter is about this. Now you go into a store and you're like,
okay, like, is this a good price for this thing? Or, you know, it's like, what is this? Where else can I get this?
I can get that stuff. It's just going to be super valuable. Yeah. And it's only going to get crazier. So, I mean,
some of the stuff that we're working on, I mean, there's
always this question of like, how do you talk to the
AI where it's like today, okay, you type on a computer or phone
and on the glasses you speak to it. And one of the wilder
things that we're working on is, is this neural interface. And I don't mean like a chip
that you jack into your brain. I think that I mean, maybe in the f
uture
someone will do that, but I don't want to. I wouldn't want to use version
one of that, right? I mean, let me just say. Right. I think you might want to wait
until that one's pretty mature. So it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, I don't want to, you know, So let's wait until I don't need
to, like, upgrade that thing every year. Like, but I think the one that we're working on
is basically a wristband. And the way that it works is it's
a neural interface in the sense that it, the way that
your kind of brain
communicates with your body and like controls
the way you move is it sends these, these like nervous system signals to to your, your, your muscles. And you can actually pick those up
with with it with an EMG wristband. And it turns out that there's
like all this extra bandwidth and and like all this extra signal
that your brain can send that is not currently
being used to move your fingers in the way that you want
and you can just like you'll be able to in the future,
essenti
ally just like type and control something like by kind of thinking
about how you want to move your hand, but like it won't even be like big motions
or it's I can just sit here and I'm like basically typing something to an eye and, and then, you know, right now the glasses
are basically it can speak back to you, but in the future,
I think you'll have something where it can speak to you
or there will be a little display. So it can
it can show you like a notification. So I think will
you'll have th
is completely kind of private and discreet interface
where you can like walk around, you know, throughout your day,
just like text different things. I mean, you can like, you know, text,
text your friends or you can text your eye and then then basically
just get the response back in real time. So I think that that is just
going to be insane. And it's, you know, the research is like
it's like we've been working on this for a while. So it's actually, you know, it's not a one year project,
but we'r
e quite a few years into it and we're actually kind of close to kind of having here that we're going
to have a product in the next two years. So I'm pretty excited about that. I mean, you're making teachers
lives harder. Imagine someone with their hand
in their pocket researching A.I. stuff while taking a test. Turnitin.com is going to have
to really bolster their defenses for sure. All right. Let's talk about you. People want to know more about you. So you've been leading Facebook
now better fo
r 20 years, literally more than half of your life. I'm sorry to remind you. Yeah. Yeah. How has your management style
evolved over the past two decades? man. I mean, that question assumes
that I had a management. So when I got started,
think the reality is like. Like I didn't. I didn't when I started Facebook,
I wasn't trying to start a company. I just like, thought it was this
cool thing to build and, you know, I was pretty convinced
when I was in college, you know,
my aspiration was I like bui
lding stuff and I thought I was going
to just go through college and then like,
go be an engineer, Microsoft. And my mom was like,
Now you're going to make a company. And it's like,
No, I'm not going to make a company. My, my, yeah, My mom actually bet me
that I was going to drop out of college. I was like, Mom, like, it's like, what? Like in a good way or a bad way?
And just, like, I don't know, we'll see my my way to college. She said, You're going to drop out. Shout out, Mom. Wow. Yeah. No, I
'm a mom. And my younger sister
bet that she was going to finish college performing,
which also happened, obviously. So yeah. So. So I started this company, but I started as a company, right? I just it's partially why I was so messy
in the beginning. We basically ended up
turning it into a company because it's like I in order to scale it,
we needed money, which means we needed a business
model and revenue and all that stuff. So basically it pulled a group people
together to to try to do that. Bu
t I don't know anything
about building a company. I mean, that was like, wasn't my goal. And it just, you know, it just turns out if you want to do big things, it
like helps to have the resources. And in order to be able
to get the resources, you want to have a business model
that supports that. So I guess over time I've sort of
had to just learn a lot of stuff and I've done that mostly
by working with really good people. I mean, one of my mentors and, you know,
my business partner for a long ti
me. I'm Sheryl Sandberg. You know, we joke that she,
like raised me as a manager and like as a parent almost. And I think that that's true in a lot of ways. It's I mean, a lot of my kind of
leadership philosophy and management just came from working with her
and other people who I really respected who had more experience. But now we're sort of in this funny place
where like and if you look at early Facebook
in like 2000, four, 2005, we we were basically
just like a bunch of kids running around,
just like building stuff
that we thought was cool and then like had some more professional executives
helping to run the place. But now all the kids have grown up, right? So, you know,
you have people like like Chris Cox, our chief product officer,
who's been there now. I think he joined like 25 or 26, Andrew Bosworth, who runs Reality Labs similarly, you know,
his has been there for you know, it's got to be it's
18 or 19 years at this point. So and along the way,
I think we all just kind of lik
e learned how to run a company together. And, you know,
we're all like pretty close friends and and it's just interesting
because you can't hire that, right? It's like if you're just thinking
about today, it's like, okay, if I was trying to build a team or like,
what advice would you give people? It's like,
I don't know, you can't you know, there's no nothing
that kind of replaces all those years of, of just experience
getting to know each other and going through all these times
where everyone t
hinks you suck and then other times when you know, people
are just giving you way too much credit for stuff that clearly is and can
actually get pan out for for a few years. But you believe in it. And we've just been through
all those experiences. So I don't know I think it's the secret to all this stuff
is it's not one person. And as much as I think
like the World wants to focus on like who's the singular figure,
it's always more than one person. And and it's the team dynamic. And I that that t
hat matters a lot. So I mean, if you can just kind of
stay focused, you find stuff that you like,
you stay engaged, you know I don't mean by the way
that it's like, okay, you set up the team and then you're kind of passive. But I think like probably one of my most
controversial leadership or management things is like, I don't actually believe
in delegating that much. I kind of think
like the way a founder should work is you should basically make as many decisions and
get involved in as many thin
gs as you can. And like, I mean, you need to know
where your limits are and where like you're just thrashing people
because you're involved in something that a half assed way
and like you can't you're not actually you don't have all the context,
But I don't know. I mean, you need all these other awesome people
because there's still going to be, no matter how much time
I put into all these things, there's going to be so much stuff
that I can't get to. And we need awesome people who can, like,
do
all the really important stuff that they're like,
I'm not, I'm not doing. But but I don't know. That's something that I guess I've just gotten more confident in over
time is just sort of feeling like, Hey,
yeah, I can go deep on all this stuff and, you know,
push it in a direction that I think. And yeah, not everything is going to go well in the near term,
but like you just learn, rinse and repeat. It could work over a long period of time. It sounds like you're having a great time
still leading
this company. You've been at it for a very long time, but we got to talk about
some of these hobbies. Marc Probably the one that people
most know you for is your love of mixed martial arts, but you also fly
helicopter hours, you hydrofoil, you'll love smoking meats, and you're
actually raising your own cow right now. What's the current obsession
for Mark Zuckerberg? gosh, Right now I'm focused a lot on knee rehab
so I can get back to fighting. It's like, man, I mean, spend budget time fighting.
But rehab takes a lot of time
because you want to, like, stay in shape and like and you can't do
everything that you were before. So it's actually it's it's not not super
time efficient, but it's really important. So that's that I think is my
is my main thing. But I've I've I've really like fighting
in combat sports and that's been awesome. But no, I mean look,
I mean I've loved I've, I mean the whole meat thing has sort of
been a fascination to for a long time. Yeah. I mean, look, ever since th
at sweet baby Ray's just sitting out here with friends,
smoking meats, you know, it's. It's. Yeah, I love it. And I always joke with. With Priscilla and my my daughters now that if I'm ever done with Metta,
I'm going to run Mark's Meats. And, you know, like, if you're like,
if you're like a kid, right? So my daughters, it's
kind of hard to wrap your head around. Like, what Metta is, right? It's just this very abstract,
like apparatus. Okay? You're like a young kid, right? So my daughter is for a
while she was just she just thought
that I was a cattle rancher. She's like, All right, Like, dad.
That's like, that's clearly what you do. It's like you're it's like Mark's Meat isn't ready for prime time yet,
but you're really focused on it. I get it. It's like you've got, like, a
few of these cows, and I've just had this this project
where I want to see if we can produce some of the highest quality
meat in the world. And I think most most commercial cattle operations
are basically constraine
d where you can't put more into the cow
in terms of quality of ingredients. Then you can then turn around
and sell the cow for when you're done. But, you know,
I obviously don't have that that issue. I'm not like trying to do this
commercially. I'm just trying to create
the highest quality stuff that we can. So and I think it's pretty fun
to like vertically integrated. So I'm like, all right, let's
see if we can like what is the densest, most, like, nutritious thing that we can feed these cows
t
o basically get them to be like the healthiest and and like, gain
weight as quickly as possible. Just be the most delicious cows. And it's a guy who is a human. What do you think like
is the thing that basically, you know, you just like sit and eat a lot
It's like beer and nuts, basically. Right. And so nuts, super dense beer induces appetite,
which I think people are familiar with. But yeah, induces appetite
I think is the kind of formal jargon in the cattle industry. You know, get them to eat
a bunch, which is, is why,
you know, for a long time a lot of the highest quality Wagyu
beef is they basically said it beer. It's not like there's this whole thing
about, okay, does it make it more relaxed? The scientific literature on
that is a little mixed. I just like read
a bunch of this. It's not. I'm not. I'm not convinced on the relaxation point,
but I do think it's clear that it makes them eat more
and then they gain more weight. So, yeah, so
but I just think it's like super fun. It's li
ke,
All right, let's bring own beer. Let's let's grow our own macadamia
nuts, processed that, like have our kids
be kind of a part of the process of like figuring out what it's like to
to kind of run in this kind of a process easier for them to do that
and be involved in the software business. So I think that that
that kind of makes sense. And I know it's just fun. Maybe maybe one day it'll be a thing,
but for now I'm just producing some meat that I like eating. Mark The women in your life
are t
elling you something. Your mom said
you're going to drop out of college and your daughters said
that you are going to be a cattle rancher. So I would take that advice to heart. Yeah, I mean, they're usually right. We will workshop the name now. Mark's me, so there's still some
some room to grow there as well. no, it's intentionally really lame. All right, All right.
And you absolutely nailed it. Then. It also sounds like you could be
the Andrew Huberman of cattle ranchers. You could launch a pod
cast
about just cattle health. And because I was learning a lot right
there, you had me interrupted. So maybe you and Andrew team out
for a little while. Cattle prod, the cattle versus the cattle. The cattle versus you. Hear, hear. Basically, Mark,
this was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time
to stop by and nerd out with us. I'm going to actually plug
your social accounts right now. You can follow Mark on the social networks
he invented at Zach. That was a very cool
sentence to say. And then also check out all the cool work happening
at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to see all the work that you're doing
with your wife, Priscilla. Mark, once again,
thank you so much for joining us. Awesome. Thanks for having me on, guys. So, yeah, that's fun. Yes, Thanks, Mark. I'd actually call up Andrew. I didn't know
you said the beer to the cows also. Yeah,
I thought that was just for you. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. And then there's a whole thing around
massaging them, t
oo, right? We're like the the Japanese ranchers,
the like it because it relaxes them. It doesn't relax them. Or maybe it does,
but but it's the main thing is if they're being stimulated,
they don't move. And if they don't move,
they're not burning calories and they're not like developing,
you know, it's like they have nice, like, loose muscles. Right? So which is so
I think that that's that's a whole thing. But, you know, there's there's a lot
there's a lot more to go in terms of stuff that we w
ant to do. When you have another 45 minutes,
we want you back just to talk cattle. The cattle, I mean, I would love to hear. It's like we have our master sire Chunk. It's just like he is like that. Like, how did we miss Chunk? I don't know. I don't know. I really should have brought up
chunk chunks. Not ready for his debut. He's not. He's not. Haven't kind of.
Now it's chunk to the Internet. But let's let's let's definitely hard shotgun here. and the final thing, Mark, I wanted to
I didn't get t
o ask you about it, but your birth time. I'm not kidding. I've been obsessing over it
ever since you posted that. I Literally tried to beat it. No vest. Didn't even get close. So whenever you're healed up,
I want to challenge you. You know, the thing is,
I think that because I had just cut weight for a jujitsu competition,
So after doing that, I was just like, really lean but hadn't
lost the muscle mass yet from doing so. Like, so then the weight vest
is mostly counteracted from just like it's l
ike, okay,
just going back to where I was before. But I think that like, that might have
I mean, it wasn't my best time ever, but I, I think that has a lot easier to do it
After you had you break it up, are you like a five, ten, five
or did you go like ten, ten, ten. Yeah, I mean, I do. What is it
I do five, ten, 20 so I can finish the squat sooner and have some extra time
to rest on the later sets. Yeah. To recover from the, the pull ups,
which are the hardest for me. I'm a push up guy. I got t
o work on it. But yes, thank you.
I have that. Like, take ups are harder for you. Listen, Mark,
I'm getting out of bed chest. Okay? I got no, I got nothing. Nothing I do. I didn't realize
I was, like, an option. my gosh. Yeah, I love it. mean, I take Apple seriously. I think it's like a good company. when the metaverse space heats up a bit. people try to call it different things
because they want to embrace our branding I don't actually believe
in delegating that much. the way a founder should w
ork is you should basically make
as many decisions as you can.
Comments
you can really see his improvements in his AI personality!
This new Mark is way better, he's more relaxed now, and being in competitive-mode with Apple will make him more fun too.
This was nuts. Thank you all for supporting the pod and help making this happen ❤
DAMN! Toby and Neal pulling a monster interview outta nowhere! Congrats guys :)
Mark was very affable and much more human than he sometimes seems. Very good talk. This is very good for his image and for Meta. He should do more of this sort of thing.
It is amazing how far A.I. Robotics have come! Mark actually seems like a real human now. Wow! Way too go Meta Dev team.
Zucks transformation has been incredible
At this rate Morning Brew will be able to afford Hair and Make-up
This is the most human I’ve seen Zuck omg
Is it just me, or is Zuck putting off a youthful vibe?
Not even a year into the MBD pod and they're already pulling heavy hitters like Mark. Congrats Toby and Neil and everyone over on MBD team!
The introductory cuts are absolutely sending me.
When I saw the intro I thought it was fake lol. That's awesome you got him on the podcast.
I normally don’t like zoom based pods but this was very well done. Relevant questions, friendly interviewers who let the guest talk - looking forward to more of your work!
Mark going after Apple WWE style and pushing “Marks Smokin Meats” is the Perfect Nerdy Billionaire vibe I wanna see! 😂
Y’all asked pretty good questions!! 👏🏼
I would love to see you guys respond a bit more to Mark’s responses! You asked great questions, and I’m not sure if this is just the format or something but when the guest gets really passionate about something and gives their answer it feels very abrupt to just ask another question instead of commenting on or reacting to what they said, even just a little bit. Otherwise I thought it was a great interview!
Crazy how Mark's AI has improved
Congratz guys, this is a huge moment for the pod!
Ever since he got into MMA his become such a likable person. Sport does something to your personality for sure. Mad respect for Zuck, hope to try Mark's Meats one day, awesome interview guys.