Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook.

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EPISODE LINKS:
Mark's Facebook: https://facebook.com/zuck
Mark's Instagram: https://instagram.com/zuck
Meta AI: https://ai.facebook.com/

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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
5:36 - Metaverse
25:36 - Identity in Metaverse
37:45 - Security
42:10 - Social Dilemma
1:04:16 - Instagram whistleblower
1:09:01 - Social media and mental health
1:14:26 - Censorship
1:31:35 - Translation
1:39:10 - Advice for young people
1:44:58 - Daughters
1:47:46 - Mortality
1:52:19 - Question for God
1:55:25 - Meaning of life

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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?

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.

I think about the hundreds of millions of people who are starving and who live in extreme poverty.

The 1000000 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 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.

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.

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, where they hope to succeed.

Mark Zuckerberg's feet are often held to the fire as they should be.

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.

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.

And 1 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 1 thing and that is to fuel the fire of optimism, especially in those who dream to build solutions.

Because without that, we don't have a chance on this too fragile, tiny planet of ours.

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?

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?

Then I'd be some computer construct and not the person who created that meta company.

Right, so this could be somebody else using the Mark Zuckerberg avatar who can do the Mark and the Lex conversation replay from 4 decades ago when meta, it was first sort of.

I mean, it's not gonna be 4 decades before we have photorealistic avatars like this.

Well, that's something you talk about is how passionate you are about the idea of the avatar representing who you are in the metaverse.

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 in person, how difficult is it, how long before we have it in the metaverse?

Well, I think this is like the key question, right?

Because the thing that's different about virtual and hopefully augmented reality compared to all other forms of digital platforms before is this feeling of presence.

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 this stuff, it's, you know, they're trying to, in some cases, deliver experiences that feel 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, no, 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 think on visual presence and spatial audio, we're making reasonable progress.

I don't know if you've tried this experience, work rooms that we launched where you have meetings.

And I basically made a rule for all of the top management folks at the company that they need to be doing standing meetings in work rooms already.

Right, I feel like we got to dog food this, you know, this is how people are going to work in the future.

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, 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 arm gestures and stuff feel more natural.

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, 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 you can't really do with 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, olfactory, obviously touch, right?

We're working on haptic gloves, the sense that you want to be able to put your hands down and feel some pressure from the table.

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 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.

I realize I'm going long, but I was told we have a few hours here.

Yeah, so I mean, it's look, I mean, that's on the shorter end of the congressional testimonies I've done.

But it's, but, you know, 1 of the things that we found with hand presence, right?

So the earliest VR, you just have the headset and then, and 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 was 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.

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 feeling of presence a lot more.

Whereas it turns out that if you just show the hands and you don't show the arms, 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 a few year period or a 5 year period.

And we won't need every single thing to be solved to deliver this full sense of presence.

Yeah, it's a fascinating psychology question of what is the essence that makes in-person conversation 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 were saying, just showing the hands is able to create a comfortable expression with your hands.

You know, people 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 be depth of experience with just words.

So that's, 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 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?

So compared to other animals, I mean, that's, that's clearly the, the, the main sense that most people have.

But there's a whole part of your brain that's just kind of focused on reading facial cues.

So, 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 far video conferencing has gotten without the ability to make eye contact.

It's sort of a bizarre thing if you think about it.

You're looking at someone's face, sometimes for an hour when you're in a meeting, and you looking at their eyes to them doesn't look like you're looking at their eyes.

You're always looking past each other, I guess.

Like a lot of times, I mean, or at least I find myself, I'm trying to look into the other person's eyes.

But they don't feel like you're looking into their eyes.

Yeah, so then the question is, all right, am I supposed to look at the camera so that way you can have a sensation that I'm looking at you?

I think that that's an interesting question.

And then, with VR 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 poses 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 you can do it in a way where it's like, okay, maybe it's not a fixated stare, but it's somewhat natural.

But once you have actual eye tracking, you can do it for real.

And I think that 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 the Metaverse or on virtual and augmented reality are going to prioritize putting these features in the hardware because like everything they're tradeoffs, right?

I mean, they it adds it adds some weight to the device.

You could totally see another company taking the approach of let's just make the lightest and thinnest thing possible.

But you know, I want us to design the most human thing possible that that creates the richest sense of presence.

Because so much of human emotion and expression comes from these micro-movements.

If I move my eyebrow a millimeter, you will notice and that means something.

So the fact that we're losing these signals and a lot of communication I think is a loss.

So it's not like, okay, there's 1 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 human brain works and how we express and kind of read emotions and you can just build a roadmap of that, of just what are the most important things to try to unlock over a 5 to 10 year period, and just try to make the experience more and more human and social.

When do you think would be a moment, like a singularity moment for the metaverse where there's a lot of ways to ask this question, but 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 now during COVID, like even falling in love or meeting friends or getting excited about stuff that is happening on the 2D digital plane, when do you think the metaverse will provide those experiences for a large number, like a majority of the population?

Yeah, I think it's a really good question.

There was someone, I read this piece that framed this as, a lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place.

But 1 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.

I think that that's a reasonable construct.

And from that perspective, you know, I think you also just wanna 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 and I probably already live a very large part of our life in digital worlds.

They're just not 3D immersive virtual reality, but I do a lot of meetings over video, or I spend a lot of time writing things over email or WhatsApp 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.

And for that, I think that there's just a bunch of different use cases, right?

And I think when you're building technology, I think a lot of it is just you're managing this duality where on the 1 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, 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, 1 or 2 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, but in general, you know, there were a lot of, a lot of different games out there.

But on PC 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.

That's obviously something that we've historically been less focused on, but I think it's gonna be really important

With workroom, do you mean productivity in the collaborative aspect?

think that there's a workrooms aspect of this, like a meeting aspect.

And then I think that there's like a, you know, Word, Excel, you know, productivity.

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 kind of preeminent company that focuses on this.

And I think that that's already on quest becoming the you know, if you look at the list of what are the top apps, social apps are already number 123.

So that's kind of becoming a critical thing.

But I don't know, I would imagine for someone like you, it'll be until we get a lot of the work things dialed in, right?

When this is just like much more adopted and clearly better than Zoom for VC, when if you're doing your coding or your writing or whatever it is in VR, which it's not that far off to imagine that because pretty soon you're just gonna be able to have a screen that's bigger than, you know, it'll be your ideal setup and you can bring it with you and put it on anywhere and have your, your kind of ideal workstation.

So I think that there are a few things to work out on that, but I don't think that that's more than, you know, 5 years off.

And then you'll get a bunch of other things that 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, we were talking before about how you're into running, and I'm really into a lot of things around fitness as well, different things in different places.

Yeah, and surfing, and I used to fence competitively, I like run, so.

were saying that you were thinking about trying different martial arts, and I tried to trick you and convince you into doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Or you actually mentioned that that was 1 you're curious about.

I thought that That was a real suggestion.

That would be an amazing chance if we ever step on the mat together and just roll around.

Well, give me a year to train, and then we can do it.

You know, you've seen Rocky IV where the Russian faces off the American.

And then you're the Rocky, the underdog that gets to win in the end.

The idea of me as Rocky and like fighting is...

a lot of aspects of fitness, I don't know 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 2, I just, I get giddy every time I step into virtual reality?

So you mentioned productivity and 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.

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.

So it's like Alice in Wonderland, just try out crazy stuff, the possibilities are endless.

And I just, I personally, and just love, get excited for stepping in those virtual worlds.

In terms of the productivity as a programmer, I spend most of my day programming.

That's really interesting also, but then you have to develop the right IDs, you have to develop, like 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 when 2 coders are working together, I mean, that, the possibility is there, super, super exciting.

I think that in building this, we sort of need to balance, there are gonna be some new things that you just couldn't do before, and those are gonna be the amazing experiences.

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, all right, 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 kind of manipulating it.

You know, 1 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 some trees over there and it'll do that.

And like, all right, put some bottles of water on our picnic blanket and it'll do that and you're in the world.

And I think there are gonna be new paradigms for coding.

So yeah, there are gonna 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.

A lot of this in terms of, I mean, just answering your question from before around, what is it gonna take before you're spending most of your time in this?

Well, first of all, let me just say this as an aside, the goal isn't to have people spend a lot more time in computing.

It's to make computing more natural, but I think you will spend most of your computing time in this when it does the things that you use computing for somewhat better.

So maybe having your perfect workstation is a 5% improvement on your coding productivity.

But look, if I could increase the productivity of every engineer at Meta by

And I imagine a lot of other companies would too, and that's how you start getting to the scale that I think makes this rival some of the bigger computing platforms that exist today.

How do you see identity in the metaverse?

Should the avatar be tied to your identity or can I be anything in the metaverse?

So there's 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.

On 1 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 there are going to be different use cases for different things.

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 all ends of that spectrum too, right?

So you'll want photo, like in some experience, you might want to be like a photorealistic dragon, right?

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