Mark Zuckerberg on Business Strategy, Parenting, Religion, and More

1. 0:00 – 0:20

   Start

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      [upbeat music] Mark, nice to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for making the time.

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg0:18

      Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward

2. 0:20 – 7:11

   Fencing and classics

   1. MZMark Zuckerberg0:20

      to this.

   2. TFTim Ferriss0:21

      You've had a very, very busy week, and I imagine most weeks are very busy, perhaps this week busier than some. But before we get to perhaps current day, I wanted to flash back just a little bit. In the course of doing research for this conversation, I chanced upon fencing. Now, fencing I had seen in connection with your name, but I had no idea that you had been as competitive as you had been. And I was hoping you could just describe a little bit your involvement with fencing and, for people who don't know, what makes fencing interesting or what made it interesting to you. And I have follow-up questions, but I, I, I have taken two fencing instructional lessons, this was maybe 10 years ago, and was inspired to do so because of the writing of Bruce Lee, of all things. But could you just describe your background with fencing and how you ended up competing?

   3. MZMark Zuckerberg1:10

      This is probably one of the more interesting places to start an interview that I've ever done.

   4. TFTim Ferriss1:14

      [laughs]

   5. MZMark Zuckerberg1:16

      I fenced competitively when I was in high school. It's not something I, I did since I was like a little kid or something like that, but, you know, I've, I've always loved sports and, and, you know, just being active.

   6. TFTim Ferriss1:27

      Mm.

   7. MZMark Zuckerberg1:28

      I like problems that you can solve intellectually, but I, I, I also just think managing your energy and kind of being out there and being physical, it's just always been a really important part of my life. And, you know, so I, I was looking for a, you know, sport that would do this in the winter in high school, right? So I, I did a bunch of running, right? So I did cross country and I did tennis as well. So I started doing fencing. And I don't know. I mean, I, I didn't do it competitively for a super long period of time, but the, the thing that I loved about it is it's o- obviously very physical and cardio taxing, right? Just being kind of on your, on your feet and kind of bouncing around. But it's also very, very mental. I mean, I ju- I, I have these memories when I was in my high school chemistry classes of like writing out sequences of moves that I wanted to try when I was doing bouts later after school that day and, you know, just like different things that you can do to win in multiple ways, right? Basically, you know, try to, you know, catch people off guard in one position that's like, okay, if they do parry you, then you're still in a better position. You can get them on, on, on the left or something or, or if they don't, then, then you, then you get the touch. So I, I just, I found it to be a very intellectual, but, but a, but a good, a good sport. I, I was never that, that good at it. You know, I did it competitively, went to some state competitions and stuff like that, but I don't think I would've been good enough to do it at college, for example. But it's mostly, it's, it's a fun thing to do.

   8. TFTim Ferriss2:50

      The closest experience that I have is with kendo. I lived in Japan for a period of time and I did some kendo. And I think it's, it shares quite a bit in common with fencing. Of course, the techniques are, are quite different. The slashing movements predominate in kendo, although you are allowed to stab to the throat if you're past a certain age [laughs] which is all a separate matter. But the idea of, as they might say in Brazilian jujitsu, this sort of position before submission is an interesting one, right? So even if your first attempt fails, you're in a superior position to execute on your next move. And it's always struck me that as much as people think of you as someone who studies or even predicts or looks at trend lines into the future, it seems like you have quite a background in studying the past, and that's where I wanted to go next, which was classics. It seems like you've spent quite a bit of time studying classics, and I was wondering if there are any books or any figures who stick out to you from that chapter in your life. Maybe that chapter continues to this day, but if you could speak to that, I figured we'll use that as a segue to other things.

   9. MZMark Zuckerberg3:59

      I loved classics. I picked it up in, in high school as well. I started studying Latin because I was so bad at speaking French and Spanish.

   10. TFTim Ferriss4:09

       [laughs]

   11. MZMark Zuckerberg4:10

       So I, I, I'm very interested in, in languages overall, but like the whole kind of thinking on your, your feet and understanding or like really quickly just I, I'm, I, I'm actually... I process things more methodically. So, so Latin was more my style because you don't have to speak it, so you can just read it-

   12. TFTim Ferriss4:25

       [laughs] Right

   13. MZMark Zuckerberg4:25

       ... at, at whatever, whatever kind of pace makes sense. And then from there I got into Greek and, and I, I actually thought that when I went to college, my plan at the time was to be a classics major. I- it turned out I took no classics courses at Harvard. I, I just, I ended up doing psychology and computer science were, were the two areas that, that I focused on. But I just loved the discipline of, of classics so much and the history. I mean, philosophically as sort of the underpinning of, of kind of Western thought, I think it's super interesting. But I've also just been very interested in basically people who shape the way we live, right? So the historical figures who I like learning about, I'd say there's like a set of people like inventors, people who just create things and, and change the world through that. I'm also very interested in historical figures who, who kind of try to like invent or usher in new ways for, for people to live. So, you know, I, I, I always thought, you know, Augustus was a very interesting historical figure. And I mean, one of the things... I mean, he's controversial for a lot of reasons and, you know, you can debate all the good and bad, but one of the things that I thought was just really always stuck with me, uh, about what he, what he did was wh- when he basically stopped the wars, he... You know, at the time in history, there wasn't really a concept of perpetual peace, right? It's like the, the concept of peace that they had at the time was like, this is just the temporary period during which your enemies are too weak to fight you, but they're gonna come back. And, and he basically like ushered in this- notion of actually trying to convert a lot of the military towards other trades because he's like, "All right. No, we're trying to, like, be more peaceful. We want to build a more positive sum economy. Let's kind of do this in a way where we can get people doing more productive things." And, and I, I always thought that that was just a really interesting historical thing, and, and in some ways has parallels today to some of the work that I think is going on in the tech industry around the whole creator economy, where it's like, if you just think about how many people today basically do jobs that they have to, that they might not actually like that much, but they're, they're, they're supporting themselves, compared to where I, I, I think and hope that the world is going, which is just a, a much more robust creative economy where way more people can do things that are, are kind of intellectually or physically interesting to them and, and basically in, in doing so build up communities around that and have enough kind of monetization and economy around that to, to, to kind of support that. That to me is, is sort of like the modern version of, of kind of how do you upgrade the way that people live and work in to, to kind of fulfill human potential. So I don't know. I think there are a lot of interesting lessons from the past. I think you can also read into it too much, but I really enjoyed it when I, when I studied it.

3. 7:11 – 11:18

   Science fiction

   1. TFTim Ferriss7:11

      Where I'm going here across a broad spectrum is trying to... And we are gonna talk about the creator economy and, and the potential of that, and also questions around it. And right now what I'm hoping to, to learn more about are some of the influences, and the influences can take many forms, right? One would be books, and I want to ask, this is from a profile in The New Yorker from 2010, and I remember this because I noticed it before I read it in The New Yorker at the time, which was for a period of time, I think the only book that was on your profile on Facebook was Ender's Game.

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg7:49

      Hmm.

   3. TFTim Ferriss7:49

      And I was-

   4. MZMark Zuckerberg7:51

      It's a great book

   5. TFTim Ferriss7:51

      ... wondering if you could j- It is a great book. It is one of my favorites. And I was, I was hoping you could explain why Ender's Game, and then if there are any other books that you have in particular that come to mind, re-read, or say gifted to other people, what those might be. But l- if we could start with Ender's Game, since it is also a personal favorite of mine. I'd love to know why Ender's Game.

   6. MZMark Zuckerberg8:14

      I actually don't think it has any unique significance, so, so I'm, I'm surprised to hear that it was the only thing on my profile, but I do love it. Um, it's a, it's a great-

   7. TFTim Ferriss8:21

      Yeah

   8. MZMark Zuckerberg8:21

      ... book. I mean, I think that kind of science fiction, not just e- exploring, you know, certain technologies, but it's also a very compelling story and has good kind of moral lessons. There are parts of the technology and things in it, like the Ansible for faster than light communication across the galaxy, that-

   9. TFTim Ferriss8:39

      Mm-hmm

   10. MZMark Zuckerberg8:39

       ... we, we had a project at our company that we named, that we, we, we had codenamed that-

   11. TFTim Ferriss8:44

       Ansible

   12. MZMark Zuckerberg8:44

       ... because of w- we're all focused on communication. So yeah, I can't really speak to. I'm not actually sure why it was the only thing on my profile. That, that-

   13. TFTim Ferriss8:50

       Oh, just the only book actually that you-

   14. MZMark Zuckerberg8:52

       [laughs] Yeah. I don't, I don't know

   15. TFTim Ferriss8:53

       ... not the only thing. [laughs]

   16. MZMark Zuckerberg8:54

       I don't think it has some kind of unique significance in my life, but I love science fiction. I mean, I have spent a lot of time reading that. I think it's often a good way to kind of understand what's possible. You know, in recent years, you know, for the last decade as I've gotten more into virtual and augmented reality and actually starting to build some of these things more, you know, I've certainly spent a lot of time reading the science fiction and going back and revisiting a, a bunch of the books around that. And it's, it's just, it's really fascinating to me to see kind of what people predict and what the sociological phenomena that, that, that people predict around this stuff as well.

   17. TFTim Ferriss9:27

       Are there any books in particular, writers in particular? I mean, uh, one who comes to mind for me would be Ted Chiang, who's written a number of short story collections like Exhalation, which seem to include a lot of potentials kind of right around the corner, right? Near, near future speculative fiction. Any books come to mind that you've done just in the course of, of reading in the last few years, whether related to VR, AR or otherwise?

   18. MZMark Zuckerberg9:52

       There's some that are just classics around this, right? So-

   19. TFTim Ferriss9:55

       Mm

   20. MZMark Zuckerberg9:55

       ... I would think at this point, anyone who's interested in this space would read Ready Player One and Snow Crash.

   21. TFTim Ferriss10:00

       Right. Snow Crash.

   22. MZMark Zuckerberg10:01

       I think Rainbow's End is one that is maybe not as commonly cited, but I think is, is maybe the augmented reality sort of equivalent of some of the, the seminal works that talk about virtual reality. One of the things that I think is pretty interesting about all of these is that they, they sort of posit that the, that the world is in some sort of dystopian state, and that I think is very different from, from kind of how, how I think about this. I think that there are all these reasons why it is very valuable for people to be able to be present in another place no matter what their, their situation is. I mean, I, I, you know, I kind of laugh about this sometimes when I... Like, you know, my, my f- family has a... You know, we, we love going down to Kauai, and it's beautiful there and, you know, we'll, we'll be out there and I'll... Oh, I love surfing, I love doing a lot of stuff, but I also, you know, love being in, in VR [laughs] when I'm, when I'm there too. So it's obviously that's not, you know, that's not some kind of dystopian thing. But I, I think that just if you look at like equalizing opportunity across the world, you don't have to be in some kind of dystopian situation to want to be present with another person who you care about or an opportunity that's better in another place. So that to me always struck me as a very interesting theme of that science fiction. But in terms of like exploring sociologically and technologically what's gonna happen, I've always found it pretty fascinating.

4. 11:18 – 17:17

   Long-term planning

   1. TFTim Ferriss11:18

      Let's talk about long-term planning and long-term bets for a second. Uh, I, I find you particularly interesting in this respect because you're a founder CEO with sort of, uh, a lot of founder-driven control. You're, you're in a sense, you know, one of the last of a generation, and you can make long-term bets. And I know when we were chatting, I guess last week a bit, you mentioned having, correct me if I'm wrong, but like a 15-year roadmap for Metaverse, right? And what I'd love to ask you is how you manage, say, the short term or the intermediate term with- within the company with employees, right? Because if you look at say, Instagram, WhatsApp, the, the bets paid off, but at the time, uh, there's a lot of scrutiny You know, the media, uh, sort of had a field day and, by and large, were wrong. But I'm, I'm wondering, since those types of bets are not necessarily obvious in the moment to everyone involved, uh, but how do you think about managing internally when you are making these long-term bets?

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg12:22

      It's hard, and I don't think that there's just one way to do it.

   3. TFTim Ferriss12:27

      Yeah.

   4. MZMark Zuckerberg12:27

      You know, obviously people are psychologically much more interested and capable of focusing on a long-term outcome when they feel secure in the near term. So when there's a lot of near-term thrash or, you know, prospects don't look good, or the market is down overall, you know, even if that's not specific to your company, even if it's a kind of broader thing, I think that that, that definitely strains people's time horizons.

   5. TFTim Ferriss12:51

      Yeah.

   6. MZMark Zuckerberg12:52

      But I think that good leadership is you, you, you try to get people excited about where you're going. You obviously... You, you can't just ignore the, the short term. There's a, a lot of stuff that we need to get done there, and at this point, you know, it's a, it's a pretty big company. So I mean, as one of our, our board members says, we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, which is probably a simplification. One of the things that I've sort of personally learned over the last, you know, 18 years of, of running the, the company is like I-I remember when I was getting started, feeling like you weren't understood kind of feels bad. I think that there's, there's a normal human impulse, which is like you want to be understood. I think that that's, that's partially why people want to express themselves and why communication is so important is like people at some level have this intrinsic desire to be kind of understood and belong and, like, feel like they're, you know, belong with the people around them. And o-obviously being in a state where you, you're kind of... something that you're trying to do is, is kind of fundamentally misunderstood or that people don't believe in it can be tough. But I don't know. After going through a bunch of these cycles, I actually feel like I've trained myself to do... to kind of see it the opposite way, which is if I'm doing something that feels too well understood for too long, then I feel like I'm just being complacent. So, you know, after, after having gone through a bunch of these different cycles, you know, a lot of things that are just not controversial today but at the time people thought were crazy, right? So taking the, the service initially from being a, a college website to not. Buying Instagram or WhatsApp, which were, you know, billions of dollars for the acquisitions. But like at the time, people were like, "What?" You know, I, I remember I th- I think it was Jon Stewart or, or, or Colbert, but they did a segment that was making fun of the Instagram acquisition that was like, "What?" It's like, "You bought Instagram for a billion dollars of money? Are you kidding?"

   7. TFTim Ferriss14:44

      [laughs]

   8. MZMark Zuckerberg14:45

      So I, I think some of these things, it's like you just... You kind of go through a bunch of these and you, you have the conviction to kind of push back on the, on the world a little bit and say, "Okay, no. We're gonna, we're gonna get through this and, and, and come out, you know, 18 months, 24 months with something that we believe in." And, and after that happens a few times, you kind of understand that that could happen. I, I think most people still will get more of these bets wrong than right. So it's not like-

   9. TFTim Ferriss15:09

      Yeah

   10. MZMark Zuckerberg15:09

       ... you know, I think it's obviously very important to not, not get too overconfident with this. But, but at this point, I, I kind of feel like if people fully feel like they understand what we are as a company and what we're doing, then I'm not pushing it hard enough. And that actually-

   11. TFTim Ferriss15:24

       Mm

   12. MZMark Zuckerberg15:24

       ... now I'm at the point where like that feels bad to me. So I kind of like wanna push us into the zone, which is like, okay, let's, let's kind of constantly be doing something that can be doubted. Because if we're not, then what are we doing, right? It's like we have this huge-

   13. TFTim Ferriss15:37

       Yeah

   14. MZMark Zuckerberg15:37

       ... opportunity to, to be able to, you know, do exciting things and, and help invent things and create things for the world, and if it's obvious to everyone that we're kinda gonna be able to do each of the things that we're working on, then I don't feel like we're, we're kind of making the most of what we need to do. I'm not sure that that answers the original question around, you know, how do you get people through it, but I, I actually think a lot of this how do you get an, an organization of 100,000 people through something is about managing your own psychology and about managing your team's psychology.

   15. TFTim Ferriss16:06

       For sure.

   16. MZMark Zuckerberg16:07

       You know, one of the things that I've, that I've always found is you can pretty much I think get an organization through and a team through almost any challenge as long as you can maintain good cohesion. So, you know, the... It's the external stuff that, that doesn't bother me that much. You know, people can criticize us. I mean, I, I obviously... You know, if they're people I respect, I care a lot about that and wanna, wanna make sure we do better. But it, it doesn't, it doesn't like make me not sleep at night.

   17. TFTim Ferriss16:31

       Mm.

   18. MZMark Zuckerberg16:31

       When our stock price goes down, that doesn't make me not sleep at night. When there's a new competitor, that doesn't make me not sleep at night. If there's an issue on my team and people aren't... and there isn't good cohesion, then I'm not sleeping well until I resolve that.

   19. TFTim Ferriss16:45

       Yeah.

   20. MZMark Zuckerberg16:45

       It goes back to the very first thing we were talking about with, you know, fencing. It's, it's intellectual and you're managing your energy. I, I think like in order to get through these things and, and, and build big long-term things, you kind of just need to... I, I think you need to take care of yourself and you need to take care of your core team and then like that... And, and basically in doing so, you can I think lead a, a pretty large organization through some pretty difficult times to do some pretty awesome stuff. I think that it's intellectual, it's energy, and it's about kind of training yourself to be uncomfortable.

5. 17:17 – 21:23

   Getting comfortable with discomfort

   1. TFTim Ferriss17:17

      Let's talk about the, the training yourself to be uncomfortable or to become more comfortable with discomfort. Does anything come to mind just in terms of managing your psychology?

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg17:25

      For my own psychology, the way that I try to manage this stuff is I wake up in the morning, and you get like whatever emails you have of like stuff that's going on in the world, right? So it's, it's world events, it's team events, whatever trends we're, we're seeing across our, our products. And often in there, there's a fair amount of bad news and like new things that I need to absorb. One of the things I've found that just, just for kind of managing my, my, myself is that if I try to just go straight into the day, it's like almost every morning when I wake up and like read, read, read through my, my emails and get the news, it's like... it's almost like getting punched with sort of like a ton of new context and it's like, "Okay, I need to like internalize this." So I've found that basically doing Something physical and, and something that's, like, meditative to take my mind off of it for, like, an hour so then I can reset and go do work is really important. So that's why, you know, things like foiling or surfing have been really important to me because, you know, when you're out there in the water, it's, like, pretty hard to focus on anything else, right? It's, I mean, y- y- it's like you- when you're on the board, you- you- you're focused on making sure you stay on the board and don't mess something up. And especially if you're, if you're kind of towing or something like that, there's not a whole lot of downtime.

   3. TFTim Ferriss18:39

      Yeah.

   4. MZMark Zuckerberg18:40

      I've found that for my own performance is significantly better when I have something like that, that's, like, meditative and, and physical and, and allows me to kind of output some energy and then I can come back in, and it's almost like I'll have subconsciously settled all of the things that, that have sort of, all, all the news that have happened in the world. Now it's like, okay, let's go deal with it.

   5. TFTim Ferriss19:01

      Yeah.

   6. MZMark Zuckerberg19:01

      Now, obviously, if, if there's something that's really an emergency, I'm not gonna, you know, go do a sport or something. I'll, I'll go deal with it, and, and obviously part of life is you, you don't always get to control your schedule and, and that's kinda how that goes. But, you know, when I compare kind of how I do on the days when I kind of get to have some time to soak that in or, or to, to kind of have an outlet versus just, like, jumping right in, I, I find I'm often, like, stewing in bad news or something, and then I just, I, I, like, I'm not, I'm not as productive. So I think that's, that's sort of my own personal way that I try to, to manage situations like this. But obviously, a key part of this is, like, having an awesome team and, and it's not, it's not, you know, primarily about me. At this point, you know, it's a big company and we have awesome people who are, who are running all these different groups. So I get that, the, what I'm, what I'm saying, kind of how I've worked out the system for myself isn't necessarily something that would work for a lot of other people.

   7. TFTim Ferriss19:53

      I think the, the meditative palate cleanser makes sense though, uh, especially if you're talking about things like foiling where the consequence of a lapse of attention on what you're doing [laughs] has immediate-

   8. MZMark Zuckerberg20:04

      Oh, yeah. Yeah

   9. TFTim Ferriss20:05

      ... [laughs] penalties.

   10. MZMark Zuckerberg20:06

       Yeah.

   11. TFTim Ferriss20:07

       So it's regulating in a sense.

   12. MZMark Zuckerberg20:09

       Maybe I'm not strong-willed enough or, like, or, or calm enough to just do straight-up meditation.

   13. TFTim Ferriss20:14

       [laughs]

   14. MZMark Zuckerberg20:14

       It's like I actually need to put myself in a situation where it's difficult to not focus on that thing.

   15. TFTim Ferriss20:20

       Yeah.

   16. MZMark Zuckerberg20:21

       But I don't know. I mean, I think part of this, too, I mean, I do think managing energy is an, is an interesting thing. I mean, some of the, the, the folks who I, who I work with at the company, they say this lovingly, but I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron.

   17. TFTim Ferriss20:33

       [laughs]

   18. MZMark Zuckerberg20:34

       In that basically you have this unending amount of energy to go work on, on something, and if you, and if you, like, point that at any given team, you will just burn them. But at the same time, right, it's managing that. So that way I can, like, manage my own energy and diffuse it w- well enough so that way it's like, okay, I, I have the thing that I'm focused on that that day and I... It's, it's really important to me that I can a- as, as often as possible manage my schedule so I can actually focus on the things that I'm naturally thinking about. I just think the engagement that you get of having, like, a, an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something than going to, getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better than, like, going and scheduling a meeting that you'll have three weeks later when, I mean, maybe the topic will still be important, but it's not like what's going on at that time.

   19. TFTim Ferriss21:18

       Yeah.

   20. MZMark Zuckerberg21:19

       Getting that balance right is an important thing for sustainability for the organization as well.

6. 21:23 – 28:51

   Virtual Reality

   1. TFTim Ferriss21:23

      Yeah, for sure. And we may come back to, to energy management. We're gonna touch a lot of subjects. We're gonna bounce from the professional to the personal and everything in between. Let's touch on some things that are kind of top of mind or might be top of mind right now, because I certainly have a lot of questions related to, say, the metaverse and a longer term roadmap. And, you know, we, we chatted briefly prior to this about engineering versus science problems, so I think I'd love to unpack that at some point. But let me ask a really specific question first, and that's related to kinesthetic feedback and engagement, right? So one thing that struck me about Ready Player One, especially in the, in the cinematic version, so the movie itself, is that you have this incredible tactile environment where they're grabbing objects and interacting with objects, feeling impact and so on. But then you see them cut to an external shot of someone in a, say, trailer where, where they wouldn't actually have that kind of feedback even though they have haptic suits in Ready Player One. What do you see as sort of the roadmap for that type of interactivity? Though, like, the more I thought about this, uh, the, the more I realized while surface level stimulation may not be quite as immersive as people would hope for, do we need to wait for some type of Neuralink type of computer brain interface where we're actually stimulating the brain and, not simulating, but actually producing sort of the perception of, uh, kinesthetic engagement? How do you think about the future of that type of hardware and interaction?

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg22:59

      So I think that there's a pretty long arc there, and it's also just pretty amazing how, how good of a sense of presence you can, you can get even with certain things being pretty raw or out of place, right? The, the original devices that we had for virtual reality didn't even have hand presence, right? They just had basically the headset, and it had this wire. So you, you kind of had this wire, like, wrapped around your neck because it, it had to go to a computer to, to power the thing. And it just over... Like, every year we basically, like, knock down one or two more barriers, right? So then we got Quest, which it, you got rid of the wire. You got it so that now you could run virtual reality at, you know, 1/50 or 1/100 of the compute power than what you have in a powerful desktop on, on just a, you know, with a mobile chip on your, on your headset. Then we got hands, and the first set of hands were basically controllers. But now you're actually getting actual hand tracking with, like, all 10, you know, fingers being able to be tracked in real time. You know, in the next version that's coming out, we have, you know, sensors for your eyes so you can make realistic eye contact with someone in, in virtual reality. And, you know, I mean, just thinking about to what extent you can do without some of this stuff, I mean, think about all the Zoom calls that you've been on over the last couple of years during COVID. There's no real eye contact over video conference.

   3. TFTim Ferriss24:18

      Yeah.

   4. MZMark Zuckerberg24:18

      'Cause your, your cameras are in different places.

   5. TFTim Ferriss24:20

      Yeah.

   6. MZMark Zuckerberg24:21

      So, and even without that, you know, it, it still gets you pretty far. So in, in VR today, adding realistic eye contact, each of these things, it's like you kinda almost don't realize that you're missing them, and then when you have them, you're like, "Whoa, that's, that's like a really core part of the, the human experience is, is being able to, you know, make eye contact and hold eye contact with someone and, like, have that gaze." So I think you'll just add more things over time, right? More realistic expressions, more realistic avatars, you know, going from, from kind of cartoon and stylistic and fun to photorealistic and having, having that work. And then at, at some point I think you will get haptics. And, you know, the way that we kind of think about, you know, a haptic glove, for example, you know, screens have resolutions, right? You think about how many pixels are on the screen, and you can actually think about haptics in your hand or anywhere else as basically also having a resolution. It's like how many, how many kind of, you know, pinpoints can it, can it make across your, your hand? And your hand is super sensitive, so it, it can actually... Your, your actual, you know, physical hand can have a very high amount of resolution for haptics. But when we first start getting haptics, they're not gonna have that high of resolution, but it's still gonna be amazing, and then every year they're gonna, they're gonna get better and better and better. So I, I think that there's, like, quite a, a far roadmap on this, which is partially what makes it super exciting, right? It's like you can have realistically a 15-year roadmap of like, all right, what is it gonna take to deliver the, the kind of virtual reality presence that you want to be, you know, feel like you're physically there with another person. At the same time, augmented reality is a whole separate set of problems, 'cause now you're putting a hologram in the real world, so that's kind of a similar thing there. But being able to just work on a project that's like a 15-year project where there's... a lot of it is an engineering problem that you just need to go build, but a lot of it is also unknown, right? So there's like six or seven key unknowns that we just have, like, multiple teams going out and trying to attack different, different approaches at that. I, I just think it's a, it's a very fascinating and fun way to, to make progress. And of course, each year you're intercepting and launching a new product. So I find this to be some of the most exciting work that, that I've ever gotten to be a part of, and I hope that for, you know, the rest of my career, that I get to engage in more projects that are sort of, you know, longer term, term-oriented with this mix of engineering and science and kind of continual milestones. I think it's just a great way to make progress in the world.

   7. TFTim Ferriss26:37

      I'd love to ask some more questions about metaverse and, uh, also the recent announcement related to Instagram and NFTs. Just to touch on that, and then we're gonna go back and fill in with some, some backstory and of some family questions, if you're open to that. So as I'm looking at the metaverse and have been observing fairly closely Web3 developments and NFTs and so on in the last handful of years, I've been thinking quite a lot about your long-term planning and then how you must think about sort of secondary effects, tertiary effects of these technological advances. And then I've also thought about, I think it was Andy Grove who had paired metrics. So he would have sort of like key, like a primary outcome metric that they were tracking, and then they would look for kind of correlated impacts that they could track that were, you know, undesirable or should be addressed in advance. And I'll give you an example. So playing with Oculus, I was very impressed with the technology because I, I used a very early, I don't wanna say prototype, but version years ago, and the advances are, are really tremendous. And I had an opportunity to chat with a friend of mine who, unbeknownst to me, at some point, and I'm blanking on the exact game title, but he was something like second in the world or third in the world in mini golf.

   8. MZMark Zuckerberg27:57

      Huh.

   9. TFTim Ferriss27:58

      And that was, I wanna say, a year, year and a half ago. Now he's not even in the top 500, right? So there's, there's clearly a large demand for this. The number of users is increasing rapidly, and it's still early, right? It's really, really early.

   10. MZMark Zuckerberg28:14

       Yeah.

   11. TFTim Ferriss28:15

       Now, when I used the technology most recently, and I had several ligaments torn in my knee, so I had the experience of actually engaging with it sitting on a couch, which was fascinating, 'cause it was my first time not mapping out sort of the playing area and walking around. So I actually had the ability to test it as somebody who was sort of mobility restricted, which was amazing. When I came out of the experience, it took a while for my eyes and brain to readjust to sort of the depth perception of objects around me. And I was chatting with this, this friend John, he said, "Oh yeah, you know, it takes about two to three months, and then you adjust

7. 28:51 – 52:48

   Sustainable livelihoods in the metaverse

   1. TFTim Ferriss28:51

      completely to that." And I'm, I'm wondering what types of societal changes, maybe physical adaptations you're tracking as more and more people come online and begin to spend more and more time using, say, VR.

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg29:06

      The framework that you're talking about, about having goals and metrics to track those goals, and then counter-metrics-

   3. TFTim Ferriss29:13

      Yeah

   4. MZMark Zuckerberg29:13

      ... is, is I think a really important one that we basically encode into all of our teams across the company, right? They're basically-

   5. TFTim Ferriss29:18

      Mm

   6. MZMark Zuckerberg29:19

      ... things that we're, that we're trying to, that, that we think are good if, basically, if we can enable more connection or, or more different things across the company. But then there are, there are definitely, there, there are kind of counter-metrics in all of these areas that we're, that we're tracking to make sure that, you know, we don't exceed or don't increase negative effects. For VR specifically, the biggest issue that, that people report is still this feeling of motion sickness. And-

   7. TFTim Ferriss29:48

      Mm-hmm

   8. MZMark Zuckerberg29:48

      ... the, the basic issue, just to, to kind of break it down, is your eye... Now, eyes are not, are not computers, but you can kind of think about it as a refresh rate, right? Where it's like if, if something changes in the world, it'll kinda take, you know, 5 to 10 milliseconds for different people for you to sort of recognize that. And if you think about what's technically happening with, with VR, basically you're, you have to render this whole world continuously, and if you Basically if, if, if a person changes their head position or, or eye position, then it expects the image to be different. But then by the time that their saccade is, is, is done, which is, you know, w- what it's called, basically your, your kind of eye refocusing, if we haven't rendered correctly what you would kind of expect to be in that space, then it, it, it creates this real feeling of discomfort over time, right? And it, and it kind of... It's not like you miss one frame and you feel terrible for, for most people, but it's over time if you're not doing that efficiently, then that creates this feeling that, that it, it creates like a, it's a real physical feeling of discomfort. So-

   9. TFTim Ferriss30:53

      Mm

   10. MZMark Zuckerberg30:53

       ... and this is partially why the early versions of, of the VR headsets needed to be plugged into a computer because they needed to, in order to be able to render a world that quickly, you needed a lot of computing power. So it's this, it's this-

   11. TFTim Ferriss31:06

       Yeah

   12. MZMark Zuckerberg31:06

       ... tremendous engineering challenge to now be able to do that so much more efficiently that you're doing that on a mobile chip, which is, you know, 1/50 or 1/100 as, as powerful as the, the desktop things, but get that to, to work really well. I would say that that problem is not fully solved yet.

   13. TFTim Ferriss31:22

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MZMark Zuckerberg31:22

       But it's getting better in every generation. And people aren't computers, and not everyone is the same, and people have different sensitivity to this stuff. So, you know, some people, if a headset is running at 60 frames per second, that won't bother them, but other people, I mean, at the other end of the spectrum, if a headset is running at 120 frames per second, they may still perceive some glitchiness. And, you know, for, for most people, if you can get to 72 or 90, you're in, you're in pretty good shape. But, you know, there are, there are, like, outliers, and people are not all the same. And, you know, at the end of the day, making this a technology that can be comfortable for basically everyone is gonna be a really critical part of, of making this happen. So that's probably the biggest effect that we see. Some of the other stuff, like you mentioned, I, I think you just need some more kind of a longitudinal study.

   15. TFTim Ferriss32:06

       Right.

   16. MZMark Zuckerberg32:07

       It's tough to exactly understand all the effects of anything right up front, but you want to be mindful of, of that, and, and kind of... and be open to the fact that what you're doing could have issues, and that you want to improve those issues. And, you know, we try to research that stuff and, and, and basically try to continuously improve it, but that's the biggest thing that we're tracking right now.

   17. TFTim Ferriss32:26

       Looking at societal changes, we could look at that for a second, then we'll come back to Instagram. You know, I've, I've been very engaged in watching, say, Axie Infinity as an example, and play to earn in different, in different forms, and it's been pretty mind-boggling to see, for instance, that there are so many players in the Philippines who are earning income, that they can now impact large elections, right, as a constituent. And I'm wondering how you see this developing, and this is, uh, certainly Meta is gonna be a primary player. There are going to be other players. But where if we get to the point where, and please poke holes in this if you have a different view of things, but if we get to a point where there's almost a, a universal basic income provided by the broad spectrum of jobs that you can have in the metaverse or online, what do you think some of the societal effects will be of that? It seems to be certainly growing faster than I ever could have imagined, even though a lot of it is maybe not right in my backyard, but it's certainly, on a global level, seems to be expanding really quickly. I'd love to hear you speak to that in any capacity.

   18. MZMark Zuckerberg33:40

       I don't interpret this as a universal basic income. I think what we're actually gonna see is just the creation of a lot of different worlds that have different rules. So I think we'll, we'll, we'll kind of explore and, and people will get to spend more time in, in worlds that there are very different rule sets around, right? Everything from, from different physics literally, to, like, kind of how, how you can move through the space, to, you know, different modes of governance, right? So, you know, one thing that I think is pretty important, and that I hope that we can build into the Horizon platform, that, you know, it's, it's the social platform that we're building, is the idea that, you know, anyone can create a space, but then spaces can be nested in other spaces, right? So you can basically create a, you know, a, a, a building or a store, and then that can be inside a city that, that someone else creates. And then there's the question there of, okay, well, how do you govern that?

   19. TFTim Ferriss34:37

       Right.

   20. MZMark Zuckerberg34:38

       Who gets a say in what policies? Who can enter it? How do taxes work? Like, what's the basic business model of that space? What are the design codes around, like, what, like, what are you allowed to build there? You know, all these different dimensions. And basically, the, the, the physical world is... I mean, there's, there's a lot of it, but it is, at the end of the day, you know, more finite than what we're gonna have with the virtual world. So, you know, not everyone can kind of get to be the mayor of, of their own virtual space and see how that evolves. But I think part of what we're gonna get to see is you're gonna have, you know, whether they, they could be, you know, young people in Philippines or anywhere else, um, around the world, experimenting with basically creating worlds that are not just a single space or an experience, but, but actually, like, an environment or a polity in a way that other people can, can kind of be a part of. And I think that there will be sort of pretty interesting innovation, you know, social and economic and, and governance innovation as long as this gets designed in a good way. So I, I guess more than any specific policy idea, I think this could end up being a, a way to basically explore a lot of different ideas and, and kind of see which of these different environments that evolve are going to be appealing to people in different ways. I... So I, I think that's gonna be wild to watch play out, and, and it's one of the things that I'm, I'm really looking forward to.

   21. TFTim Ferriss35:56

       Are there any societal shifts or changes, uh, not necessarily catalyzed by Meta, but just that you see coming or plausibly coming that you guys are trying to get ahead of or think about, just in terms of, of mitigating problems later? Is there, is there anything that comes to mind?

   22. MZMark Zuckerberg36:16

       I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're getting at, but one big shift that I think is happening Is the rise of distributed work.

   23. TFTim Ferriss36:24

       Mm-hmm.

   24. MZMark Zuckerberg36:24

       I don't view that as a problem. I think it's good because, I mean, there's, there's just a lot of research that shows that people's opportunities, social, economic, and otherwise, are generally pretty anchored to physically where they are.

   25. TFTim Ferriss36:34

       Yeah.

   26. MZMark Zuckerberg36:35

       And I think sometimes people draw this juxtaposition of there's, like, the digital world and the real world. That's not actually how I think about it. I think that there's a physical world and a digital world, and the real world is actually both.

   27. TFTim Ferriss36:48

       Yeah.

   28. MZMark Zuckerberg36:48

       And increasingly, I think people will use these technologies to be able to be present in places that they physically can't be, and I think that that's really powerful, right? I mean, it's like we're doing this podcast, and we're not sitting next to each other physically, but it, like, feels like we're-

   29. TFTim Ferriss37:05

       Right

   30. MZMark Zuckerberg37:05

       ... we're, we're, we're here, and we're, we're kind of having a, a live conversation. And in the future, you know, maybe, you know, five years from now, if we were doing this, we'll have AR glasses, and, you know, a hologram version of me will be on the couch next to you, and I think that that, that will be even better than what we're doing right now. So I think that through video chat, you can have moments where you feel present, but I think through things like virtual and augmented reality, when you can, like, have an office and someone can be walking through it as a hologram even though they're physically in a different place, I think that you'll just be able to much more naturally unlock more of the opportunities, both social and economic, and, and I guess other- others as well, of being able to be around people and be present no matter where you actually are. So people will be free to, to kind of live where they want, maybe where their family physically is, you know, in a country that they grew up in, but they'll have all the opportunities that will be available around the world. So that I think is, is awesome. I think it's one of the most promising things about the future. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is sort of taking the conversation in a different direction. We actually recently did this exercise at our company where we were thinking about, okay, we're coming up on almost 100,000 people soon in, in our company, and w- we kind of think about our values as a company as, like, our cultural operating system, right? It's like, how do we, how do we basically get work done well and continue to build the things that we, that we need to build? And, you know, a big part of the, the values, and I'd love to talk through them here. I mean, I haven't... This is actually the, the first podcast or, or any public thing that I've done where I've discussed any of, any of the values. So I think it'd probably be pretty interesting to, to go through it.
8. 52:48 – 1:03:48

   Web2 to Web3

   1. TFTim Ferriss52:49

      I'd love to ask a, a few more questions about just Web3 in general, and then maybe backstep for a second to ask you about a number of other facets in your life. With, with Instagram and NFTs, so I know that, that Web3 is getting a lot of airtime right now. And, you know, I just came from a separate conference where, like, every conversation involved Web3. I... And it, it strikes me that, you know, Web2, Web3, decentralized, centralized are going to coexist. I mean, I'm no expert, but it seems that people want curation. In many cases, they want trusted third parties. I don't want to always be my own bank. It's... There's, there are good reasons why I use banks instead of [laughs] not taking on all those responsibilities myself. And I'm wondering how, let's just say in the case of Instagram, some challenges that perhaps you s- you foresee. And I can imagine, for instance, if people can turn hypothetically posts into NFTs, how that might affect, let's just say, content moderation and, uh, safety precautions and so on if they actually have ownership of their posts, right? So, I mean, this is a hypothetical that I'm just kind of throwing out there, but what type of challenges do you foresee coming up in the near term or in the long term?

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg54:09

      The one that you just mentioned is, is I think a really fundamental one. I mean, at some level you can make things censorship resistant, which has a bunch of equities, and there are certainly a lot of people who feel like their, their expression is restricted online more than they would like. But that also prevents, if, if you really can't stop people from expressing things, then how are you going to fight against terrorism or child exploitation or things that people think are, like, really awful, even the people who generally want more stuff to, to, to be allowed online. So I, I think that they're... Having the, really removing the ability for anyone to do any kind of moderation at all in a broader platform, I think is problematic. I think in something like messaging, we don't expect the people who run our messaging platforms, you know, whether it's us or Apple or whoever to to go kind of moderate a, a, a message that you sent in private. But it's, it's, it's sort of this distinction between the living room and the town square, right? If you're in, in a space that's a broader space, then I think that there, there is a little more need to make sure that things conform to the values that society wants, right? And, and, and reducing things that are just really... That I think everyone agrees are bad, like terrorism and, and child exploitation and bullying and things like that. But taking a step back on your question around Web3 and, and NFTs, I come at a lot of this from the perspective of thinking about the metaverse and how to make it more interoperable and a better environment for creators, right? Because ri- right now, so I do think that there's, there's an interesting conversation to have around, you know, Instagram and, and Facebook and what to do there. But I, I kind of... I tend to think about that as sort of how can you help bootstrap a creative economy in these 2D social apps that will be much, much bigger once you get to the, the, um, this metaverse vision over time. And, um, I think the reason why interoperability is so important is because... Like, i- imagine this case, right? So you're, you're basically... You know, we get to a point where instead of spending, you know, three hours a day on video conference calls, you're now spending that same time in, in basically feeling like you're actually present with someone, either because they're a hologram on your couch with augmented reality, or you're in virtual reality in something like Workrooms, but, but a future version of it where you're, like, actually, you feel like you're physically there with them around a table. Okay. So now in a world where you're spending a few hours a day doing that, you're gonna care about how you express yourself, right? So that's both the avatar, right? Do you show up as a photorealistic version of yourself? Are you a dragon? Are you kind of a stylized version? But a lot of this is gonna be like, okay, how do we choose to express ourselves is through the clothing and what we wear and what we put on. But now imagine that, you know, basically every app that you go to, anything that you do to express yourself, you know, so you get a sweatshirt, it's in an app, you can't actually bring that to another app. That would just be massively stifling for the whole creative economy because now as a, as a consumer, you're not gonna wanna buy a lot of, you know, sweatshirts because they're not gonna be that useful 'cause you can't bring them between places. And because you're not gonna wanna buy that much, it's gonna be less useful for creators and fewer people are going to be able to make a living basically designing these kind of experiences or virtual architecture or virtual clothes or, or different things like that. So the ability to be able to take how you want to express yourself and take your stuff with you between these different experiences, I think is just, like, a really key kind of technical principle and standards thing to hopefully achieve with the metaverse. So I hope we can get there. And in order to push in that direction, I think it's helpful to start sooner in things like Instagram and Facebook by, by supporting the communities that are, that are doing things like NFTs. So that way you can get to minting, you can get to bring your stuff around between these different places. But I do think that the, the challenges that you're mentioning where all systems I think end up being some s- some combination of some element of decentralized and, and centralized. I think actually a lot of new systems just basically create value by decentralizing and creating more opportunity in some area by creating a new tool that a lot of people use. But I think we'll need to get the balance right, and, uh, that's something that I, I, I just... I, I'm probably more optimistic about the Web3 stuff than most other people who are running these big companies. So I, I would... I'm trying to push us to be more forward-leaning on that. And our kind of fundamental belief is that if we, if we create more use cases where creators can start to do this stuff, then you'll get more experimentation and you'll also just get a bigger creative economy over, over time, which I, I, I think is a huge part of the goal.

   3. TFTim Ferriss58:44

      Yeah, for sure. Well, that's gonna be, it's gonna be exciting to watch. I have to say also that doing a bit of biographical research, looking at your trajectory, having known quite a bit already, it's incredible to me how much complexity you have learned to grapple with in the sense that now on a global stage, if there are conflicts or state actors who want to engage or need to engage, you know, Meta is almost always, [chuckles] it would seem going to be on the playing field in s- in some capacity. And it's, it's just very impressive to me that you have, from the very beginning, reached this point where you're grappling with, with so many different layers of complexity. So I, I just wanted to say that first and foremost.

   4. MZMark Zuckerberg59:30

      I appreciate that. [chuckles]

   5. TFTim Ferriss59:32

      I can't even imagine. I have enough trouble dealing with the complexity of a, of, of a tiny team of, of fewer than 10 people, [chuckles] much less 100,000 and then the global stage. One thing I did want to ask about, so I had Noah Feldman on this podcast a long time ago. You put a lot of time and thought into the oversight board.

   6. MZMark Zuckerberg59:48

      Yeah.

   7. TFTim Ferriss59:48

      What is your as- assessment of, of how that's, how that's going?

   8. MZMark Zuckerberg59:53

      Well, I think it's early, but I, I think the key here... One of the things that, that I think has been really promising is that society needs a network of different institutions that it feels like are legitimate or have some legitimacy for making decisions in, in order to basically accept the decisions and feel like they're fair. And I think one basic issue that we've found ourselves in is that there's just no way that any single private company should be responsible for arbitrating so many questions of social values, right? Between, you know, free expression and safety or, you know, locking things down to ensure privacy versus making sure that the marketplace can be open and competitive, right? It's like these, it's like these, these are real issues and there's equities on all sides, and there's no single decision that any company can make on any of them that I think is gonna be universally accepted. So I think therefore, you, you really want to not set up a situation where, where one company is, is... kind of has to make a lot of these decisions by themselves. That's why I wanted to create this oversight board. I, I, I recognize that we're always going to have to Be kind of the first line and we're gonna be responsible for making the moderation decisions on our platform. But I kind of thought it was important that we shouldn't have the final say in the most important decisions. And that there was like, uh, you know, a, a, a different body. You know, it's... The, the judicial analogy is something like a Supreme Court, although obviously, you know, there, there are all these differences here. But something that people can appeal to, and that we can also refer some of the most complicated cases to, and that they can make the final and binding judgment on that. And o- one of the things that we've seen that I think has been interesting is that it does seem like there's a little bit more acceptance when the oversight board weighs in on something complicated than when we just do it ourselves. And I think part of that was we put a l- lot of thought into, you know, making sure that the people who, who are, who are on the oversight board are kind of world-renowned in terms of a focus on human rights, really focused on, on free expression as well. Because, you know, at the end of the day, these platforms are about giving people a voice. Diverse, you know, spanning a large portion of the globe. But, but it wasn't, it wasn't obvious that, that... It's... You know, legitimacy isn't, like, a binary thing. It's not like either it's completely rejected or it's completely accepted by everyone. You know, we were mindful in setting this up, and I, I, I think the oversight board has also done a good job itself in, in kind of managing its independence. It is a completely independent organization from us, and, and it has to be. And, and kind of its independence is super important for i- its continued legitimacy. Overall, I'd say I'm, I'm sort of optimistic about how it's going. But I think building that sort of trust and legitimacy also takes time. It's not like a thing that you can just turn on in a year, and then all of a sudden people will be like, "Okay, this thing exists. Great." It's, it's gonna be, you know, it making decisions, you know, it often overruling us or rebuking us on things, and people seeing that we respect its, its, um, independence and its authority and going and implementing that. That's, I think, how it, how it basically builds legitimacy over time. But I think as an institution, it's really important that we have this kind of independent function. O- of course, over time, having clearer rules set in, in kind of democratically elected Congress would be, I think, the most useful thing. And w- we're getting that more or less in different parts of the world. Uh, you know, obviously it's, it's a little harder in the, in the United States. The, the First Amendment is great, so I, I'm obviously hugely supportive of the First Amendment. But I think that makes it harder for, for anyone in, in the United States to, to basically create or craft different regulations that, that kind of weigh in on some of these trade-offs. But I do think over time people will, will kind of... There, there will be a, a balance that is struck across all of this. And I think that this is all part of that moving towards that equilibrium.

9. 1:03:48 – 1:09:11

   Partnership with Sheryl Sandberg

   1. TFTim Ferriss1:03:48

      You mentioned Sheryl earlier. I'd like to come back to, to Sheryl. So this is a question from a, a female friend of mine. I'll just read it kind of as it's, as it's written, and I'd love to, to hear your thoughts. So Mark's business partnership with Sheryl is legendary. I can't, off the top of my head, think of another partnership like this. Male, female, lasted 15 or so years, 15 plus, still going. Why does it work? How does it work? Why does he think so very few others have such a partnership? And I'll just add one more. You know, what has shifted in his life and business as a result? So I would just love to hear any, any thoughts on that because it does strike me also as a very unusual partnership that has been... that has proven itself with a tremendous longevity.

   2. MZMark Zuckerberg1:04:33

      Yeah. I mean, I, I think in a lot of ways that partnership has defined the growth of the company. And, and so first of all, I, I would give a huge amount of the credit for this working to Sheryl. I think she is an amazing person. And if you think about where... You know, when, when she joined the company, I was like a kid, right?

   3. TFTim Ferriss1:04:52

      [laughs]

   4. MZMark Zuckerberg1:04:52

      I mean, it's, um... She was actually as old as I am now.

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:04:55

      Mm.

   6. MZMark Zuckerberg1:04:55

      This was 15 years ago. And, and you know, I was in my early 20s and, and didn't know anything about, about, about business or running a company or anything like this. And I just think the, the kind of extraordinary amount of patience that she had. And I mean, in a, in a way is like, as a manager of an organization, it's almost like she raised me like a child. And, and not just me. I think, like, a lot of the people we have on the, on the team now. So, I, I mean... So I think she's, she's exceptional in, in that way. One thing that's interesting about our company is that the business is sort of oddly divorced from the actual product, right? So most things it's like, okay, you build a product and you sell the product. And in our case, I think one of the things that created enough space for someone who has as much energy and, and is as senior as Sheryl to, to join, is the fact that in, in the type of business that we have, the consumer part of what we do is actually somewhat distinct from the advertising and the business part of what we do. So, you know, there was, there was enough space, I think, in the company to have, to have two people, right? Who, who basically-

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:06:03

      That's a good point

   8. MZMark Zuckerberg1:06:03

      ... were, like, primary principles for the company. And, you know, I've, I've debated this with a bunch of other peers and people who've created companies. I mean, I know I, I... You, you had a great podcast with Daniel Ek a while ago towards the beginning of COVID.

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:06:16

      Yeah.

   10. MZMark Zuckerberg1:06:16

       And now I, I've had this discussion with him a bunch of times. He's like, "I just couldn't do that," right? It's like, because he says, like, literally for, for Spotify, it's like they, they build the, the business and the content and all that stuff is, like, part of... That's, like, one kind of package. Whereas I think we're sort of uniquely set up where we can... I can focus on the, the consumer part of what we do, and she can focus on all the advertising and building the business, and that just has worked incredibly well over, over a long period of time and, and I think will for, for, for a long time to come. So I just have a huge amount to learn from her. And I think she probably feels... I, I guess she feels the same way, but you'd have to ask her.

   11. TFTim Ferriss1:06:51

       [laughs] Yeah. Maybe that'll be round two.

   12. MZMark Zuckerberg1:06:54

       Yeah.

   13. TFTim Ferriss1:06:54

       So I do think the, the, you know, the separation of church and state, I mean, that's p- probably an overstatement, but the, the clearly delineated halves of the company, so to speak, lend themselves to that. It's a really good point. What are her Superpowers. I know that may be a strange word to use, but I think of, say, Warren Buffett referring to Charlie Munger and saying he has the best 60-second mind on the planet, right? They have very complimentary skill sets, slightly different views of the world, although highly compatible values. What are Sheryl's superpowers that come to mind, if any?

   14. MZMark Zuckerberg1:07:27

       Well, I think she has a very good combination of, like, IQ and EQ. People either, I think, tend to be more manager or more strategic, and I think she is very unique in being both. And I just think that that's pretty rare, right? And, and, and o- obviously, if you get, if you get someone who's great at, at strategy or great at products and they're not a great manager, that's great, right? It's like, I mean, if you can have someone who's excellent at one of those things, it's like you hire them every day, right? So I think it's just exceptionally rare to find people who are kind of spike in both of those areas. And I think about this in terms of... She actually uses a lot of dating analogies. I don't. But, you know, I was talking to a friend who was single recently, and we were talking about why she was single. And I do just think, like, some people wanna go through life with partnerships more than others.

   15. TFTim Ferriss1:08:13

       Yeah.

   16. MZMark Zuckerberg1:08:14

       I think that there are some people who, like, want a co-founder, they want a partner who they can run the thing with and who can kind of ha- they can have that experience with on a day-to-day basis. And then there are other people who are just like, "Okay," like, "No, I'll just, I'll just have a team of, like, you know, five or six people around me, and, like, I'll, I'll kind of be the, the leader or the founder. But I don't need, like, a, another, you know, person." And I, I just think that's, that's different.

   17. TFTim Ferriss1:08:37

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MZMark Zuckerberg1:08:38

       Partnership has always meant a lot to me, both in my, my personal life and, and in work. I, like, I, like, want people to be on the voyage with me, right? It's like this isn't, like, a solo story. That's, like, a lot of how I derive meaning in, in life. And a- again, you'd have to ask her whether she... Maybe she's oriented in a, in a similar way. But I think, to some degree, I think whether partnerships work over time, probably the number one factor in that is whether you want the partnership to work.

   19. TFTim Ferriss1:09:04

       [laughs] Yes, for sure. Or if out of the box, in a sense, you are predisposed to partnership.

10. 1:09:11 – 1:17:20

    Family and parenting

    1. MZMark Zuckerberg1:09:11

       Yeah.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:09:11

       Right? Well, let's actually use this as a way to move to a question or just a... I mean, an observation and then a question that I'd love to ask, and we can take it any direction you'd like to. So th- this is from a [laughs] mutual friend who, who said one thing that most people don't know is that his mom is an MD, but she stayed home and never practiced medicine. She worked at the front desk of his dad's orthodontic business, which was, which was under their home. And she was wondering, you know, how these family dynamics have shaped who you are today and how you parent your own children. So that's a big question that could go a lot of directions, [laughs] I, I recognize. But I'd love to hear you... To speak to that in any way that makes sense.

    3. MZMark Zuckerberg1:09:54

       So I'd say that, that, that story is partially true. My mom and, and dad are both doctors, and my mom did practice for a bit. But it is true that when Randy, my older sister, was born, I guess my mom was having a hard time finding childcare and people who she trusted enough to raise the kids, so she decided that she wanted to spend more time with us. But my dad's dental office was attached to the house, like you said, so it was just this, like, magical thing where... I mean, my parents both worked super hard growing up and were great role models in that way. But also, like, when I got home from school, I could just, like, throw my backpack on the couch and run downstairs and go see them. And then my dad would always, like, be drilling someone's tooth and, like, that person was probably not that happy that I came in and was like, "Hey, Dad."

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:10:33

       [laughs]

    5. MZMark Zuckerberg1:10:34

       But, um, plenty of stories there. And they were great parents for, for, for us growing up. They really prioritized family, which is something that I definitely took from them. And I think not only did I take it from them for myself, but it was really meaningful for me in basically, like, who I look for as a partner. And Priscilla, I think, is really focused on this, and she obviously has an amazing career and has way more jobs than I do in addition to being a parent, but the family orientation is a really big deal. My parents cared that we, like, achieved and did great in, in school. But beyond that, they didn't really care what specific thing we were interested in. They just wanted to expose us to a bunch of things. And then if we were interested in something, then they would try to kind of push us to be... to become excellent at that thing. But, you know, my mom was never like, "You should go fence." She was just like, "You know, y- like, sports are good," right? It's like, "Go... Like, go find some, some sport." And it's like, "Oh, you like fencing?" It's like, "All right. Well, let's get good at that." You know, it's like... So I have three sisters, and they're all kind of excellent at very different things, which is... It's... Our, our, our family is, I, I think, quite musical, but that's most expressed through Randy, who is just an excellent musician. And I guess you can kind of go through the different siblings. I, I guess I got computers.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:11:55

       [laughs] That seems to have worked out for you.

    7. MZMark Zuckerberg1:11:57

       Yeah, I, I, I think so. I'd say Donna's, like, the intellectual one, and, and Elle has always been the, the kind of most well-rounded and, and social and athletic of us, which is... You know, as, as I've grown up and I've, I've kind of gotten even more into sports, it's been really fun just getting to, to kind of see her... How, how much she is... How, how much better she is than me at, like, skiing and all these, and all these things that, that we, we kind of grew up together doing. But no, I, I, I think, like, that's, that's sort of how I hope to raise our kids is, like... Yeah, I w- I, I mean, I, I, I care a lot that they're gonna be good at school. But, like, but I also care that they can get exposed to a lot of different things and, and kind of choose the things that they want to do. It's a fun adventure. One of the things in terms of my parenting is I, I try to... No matter what is going on in the day, I, I always do bedtime with them. I mean, I guess every once in a while I have to travel, although with COVID, it's been nice. I haven't had to travel that much. So that's maybe one silver lining of the, of the pandemic for the last couple of years. But it's... But basically, you know, I just take an hour every day and, you know, we, we read, we, like, sing, we [laughs] You know, it's, um... You know, I'm, I'm reading this book with them now, The Way of the Warrior Kid, which is, is, is good. I recommend this.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:13:13

       Wait a second. Is this Jocko?

    9. MZMark Zuckerberg1:13:15

       It is.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:13:15

        This is Jocko Willink. Look at that. [laughs] That's great

    11. MZMark Zuckerberg1:13:19

        Do you know him too?

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:13:21

        So Jocko's first ever long form public interview is on this podcast.

    13. MZMark Zuckerberg1:13:25

        Okay, there you go.

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:13:26

        [laughs] Yeah. So I know Jocko very well.

    15. MZMark Zuckerberg1:13:28

        So this book was recommended to me by Tobi Lütke, the founder and CEO of Shopify.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:13:34

        [laughs] Yeah.

    17. MZMark Zuckerberg1:13:34

        And the girls love it, and now they've started training jujitsu.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:13:37

        [laughs]

    19. MZMark Zuckerberg1:13:37

        So this is, this stuff, you know, takes on a life of its own. But it's super fun just having stuff that we do together every day. And then I, I always, you know, wrap up the day with them... We, we have this routine that, um, that Max calls the good night things, which is basically every night we go through, I'm like, "All right, what are the things that are most important in life?" And we go through it. It's like, it's health, loving family and friends, and something you're excited about, and like, what did you do to help someone today?

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:14:05

        Mm.

    21. MZMark Zuckerberg1:14:05

        And, and we basically go through each of these things and it's like, all right, so health. It's like, well, what did you do to, like, make yourself stronger, more fit today? And like, if you're, if you get hurt, right, it's like Max broke her leg skiing once, and it's like, okay, well, like, let's go through the parts of your body that, like, still work and that you're gonna, like, be able to use while you're recovering. And it's like, okay, loving family and friends. It's like, let's go through, you know, something that you did today with a person who is meaningful to you. And then I think something you're excited about is... And this is actually, this is, like, my philosophy on life. I'm just trying to, like, boil it down for them. I guess the, the adult version of this is I think you have to have something that you're looking forward to for the future. I think that that's just a really important part of keeping people going with the weight of life. But for kids, you know, it tends to be something that they're excited about tomorrow. You know, more, more often than not, it's just like, "All right, I'm excited to see mom in the morning," or like, "I get to eat Cheerios at breakfast."

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:14:56

        Yeah. [laughs]

    23. MZMark Zuckerberg1:14:56

        It's like, okay, it's not, not super inspiring, but, um, but, but, but the right, the right basic idea.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:15:00

        [laughs]

    25. MZMark Zuckerberg1:15:01

        And then every once in a while it's something like, okay, like Max is like, "I'm gonna get ski poles next week." And it's like, okay, that's like a big milestone, right? Or it's like, "I'm gonna lose my first tooth," right? Or like, "I can't wait until I can, like, have... do jujitsu again." And then the, the last one I think is probably the most important, which is like, I'm like, we... And I think especially for our family, right, and especially for, for these girls who are obviously growing up in very wealthy family, it's like, you're gonna do something nice to help someone every day, right? And, and it's like we, we... Like, this is just, like, an important service orientation that I, I just want, you know, our, our, our family to have. And we just all go around and, like, I tell them something nice that, that I tried to do to, to help someone and, and they have to tell me something nice that they did to, to help someone. And it could just be, like, a, another kid at school or it could be mom or, or a cousin or, or, or something like that. But probably much to their chagrin, I don't let them go to sleep until they can tell me something that... nice that they did-

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:16:01

        [laughs]

    27. MZMark Zuckerberg1:16:01

        ... to, to help someone that day. So that's probably, like, the best encapsulation of how I think about parenting and the values that I wanna try to impart to them.

    28. TFTim Ferriss1:16:10

        Thank you for sharing all of that. You know, and I wanted... I wanna say a few things. Number one, Tobi, one of my favorite people. I've known Tobi-

    29. MZMark Zuckerberg1:16:17

        Yeah, he's great

    30. TFTim Ferriss1:16:17

        ... since 2008 or so. And people might be wondering why am I asking about family, why am I asking about parenting? And part of the reason I'm asking is because many people who listen to this podcast listen to model. They listen to model people. And I think it's very important to get a holistic picture of how people think about and prioritize things in their lives and manage things in their lives. Because you can end up, if you're not careful, say, in the realm of business, modeling someone who is, from an external perspective, very financially successful, but their family lives, their relationships are in shambles.
11. 1:17:20 – 1:23:20

    Religion

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:17:20

       with nonetheless. Speaking of things that are important in life, I would love to ask you about this, and this is gonna be a interesting transition, the, the, the sacred and then the secular. And for the secular I have a, I have a very specific kind of technical question, but on the sacred, I'd love to ask you what role religion plays in your life, if any. How do you think about that?

    2. MZMark Zuckerberg1:17:42

       It's actually, I- I think, playing an increasing role in, in recent years. And so, I mean, I, I was raised Jewish. And I think for, I don't know, I'd say, you know, from the time I went to college or so, maybe I, I wasn't as focused on it. But I think a few things in the last five or six years have made me a little more focused on it. One is, of course, family and having kids, right? So you, like, wanna have traditions for the kids, and a lot of the time it's like, okay, well, here are the things that I did when I was growing up that I thought were meaningful, and the ones that are good you, you want, you wanna do, and the ones that, that aren't, um, you don't. But, but I, I, I, I just found having that community and values grounding was, was really valuable. So w- so we are raising our, our, our girls to be Jewish, and that's, that's just become a, a more important part of our, our lives. So it's like every Friday, pretty much no matter what's going on, we do Shabbat dinner. And Priscilla actually loves this. I mean, she's basically... It's sort of a meditative thing for her, but s- from, I think about Tuesday or Wednesday, she starts carving out like an hour or so of the day to, like, start cooking the Shabbat dinner. And basically we have a bunch of friends over and, like, and it's, it's just, like, a real center point to the week. That element, I think, is more cultural. I'd say for, for me personally and for our company, probably for a lot of people around the world, I mean, the last five or six years have been pretty tough, right?

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:19:12

       Yeah.

    4. MZMark Zuckerberg1:19:12

       It's... I mean, if you just look at how people felt about our company, you know, before 2016 If you look at, like, s- average sentiment around the company, it's like there was almost, like, never a month when the sentiment was negative, and since 2016, there's almost never been a month where the net sentiment has been positive. There have been so many social issues that have been kind of brought to the forefront that... You know, we talked about this a little bit before in terms of the oversight board and how it's important that it's not just, like, you know, one person or one company making all these decisions trying to balance these complex social equities. But, you know, part of me is like I've kind of gotten an appreciation for why... You know, it's, I, y- there, there just need to be things that are bigger than you in your life. So even though, you know, our country has a lot of struggles, I probably believe more in democracy now than I would have. I probably didn't think about it that deeply before. But I, I just think, like, you know, believing in, in, in kind of democracy in our institutions is, like, sort of a, a bigger s- force than any individual, I think is sort of a grounding thing. But I think similarly believing that there are things that are bigger than that, like God, is also just sort of a really grounding thing for me. The more you sort of study the Bible or the Torah or whatever, I mean, there's, there is, like, just a lot of wisdom in it in, in terms of, you know, how to live your life, how to think about creation and building. I mean, no matter what you're doing, no matter how kind of modern or technological it is, you know, I just think that there are interesting lessons. It's, it's really kind of meaningful to me. It's like at the beginning of the, the Torah in Genesis, most of like the... The Bible's basically rules for how to live your life and... But it starts with... It's like why does it start in this place of, of talking about the creation? And it's, like, it starts off with like, okay, God created people in, in God's image, and it's like, well, what does that mean? What does, what does that mean you're supposed to go do? It starts off talking about creation, right? It's like how, how God created all this stuff. It's like, yeah. I, I think that there's, like, a, a real interpretation in that that is kind of personal to me, which is, like, a lot of what we are here to do is create good things in the world, and I think that that's, like, very intrinsic to... You know, it's like when I'm having a bad day or kind of a bad month, I just think, like, there, there's something that's sort of grounded in... It's like, no, this is, like, what I think a big part of what we are here to do is, is, like, build things that make the world better, and I think that that is, like, a fundamental thing that is, is sort of ancient wisdom. As people face challenges in their lives and as you think about the next generation, I think that these are both things that tend to ground you and tie you to much longer arcs and traditions, and that's certainly been the case in my life.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:21:58

       I've actually gone to a number of, uh, Shabbat dinners here in Austin with friends of mine, and it's, it's made me feel like I have perhaps a, a, a ritual deficiency. [laughs] It's such an incredibly grounding, nourishing tradition, I mean, uh, outside of the religious context, and it also, what you're saying reminds me... I'm blanking on the book. I think it's Four Thousand Weeks, but that's by Oliver Burkeman, and there's a chapter called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, which is the relief that one can feel when their time horizon and what they're considering sort of spans outside of themselves.

    6. MZMark Zuckerberg1:22:34

       Balance is to understand that there are things that are bigger than you, but what you do still matters.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:22:40

       Yeah. So I, [laughs] you know, I'm gonna get to the secular question, and I know we're, uh, running up on time shortly. But in the 2010 New Yorker profile [laughs] which can't believe everything you read, so we'll see where we go. But among interests that were cited here, one was eliminating desire.

    8. MZMark Zuckerberg1:23:00

       [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:23:01

       Do you recall having this in your interests? And [laughs] I, I'm curious about this though because-

    10. MZMark Zuckerberg1:23:07

        I'm very emo.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:23:07

        It is very [laughs] emo.

    12. MZMark Zuckerberg1:23:08

        That might have been more of a phase of, uh, of, of life.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:23:10

        [laughs] That was the Mark emo phase.

    14. MZMark Zuckerberg1:23:13

        Like paint my room black. Yeah, no, it's... [laughs]

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:23:15

        All right. We can, we can chalk that up to emo. So emo, emo period, check, explained.

12. 1:23:20 – 1:28:12

    Mark’s annual, personal challenges

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:23:20

       I'm gonna get to the technical question. Before I get to that though, you did personal challenges annually for about 10 years. Which, which challenge ended up being much easier than expected and which one ended up being much harder than expected? Either or. Just be curious to know.

    2. MZMark Zuckerberg1:23:38

       I still do stuff like this. I don't, like, make as big of a deal of it anymore, [laughs] but, but I... I mean, but I think just kind of throwing yourself into different situations to learn new things is... I don't know. I think that that's just a big part of life. So...

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:23:52

       Yeah.

    4. MZMark Zuckerberg1:23:53

       Well, which ones were hard? One, I tried to meet a new person every day for the year. That was hard for me. I'm pretty introverted. I built some amazing relationships out of it. I, you know, I started teaching this class at the local Boys & Girls Club with a friend and, like, mentored the kids for... Just talked to them a couple weeks ago. They're, they were all, like, none of their families had gone to college before, and now they're all graduating college. It's pretty cool.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:24:19

       That's amazing.

    6. MZMark Zuckerberg1:24:20

       But I'm super introverted, so I think that that's probably been another silver lining of the whole distributed work thing for me, is having space to, to kind of think and, and kind of control my, my time and, like, not, not get interrupted by other people so much. But it's an interesting balance being introverted but also, like, being pretty sensitive and caring a lot about other people. I think that, that people kind of think that, that introverts are, like, you know, for, like, don't like other people or something, and that's not true. I just, just get overwhelmed easily.

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:24:49

       Yeah.

    8. MZMark Zuckerberg1:24:50

       And then some of the ones... I... The, the interesting thing is they all went in weird directions, right? So one year I did this, like, year of running, and then it's like I just r- did all kinds of different running. I did, like, sprints. I did long distance running, and then, like, my knees started hurting, so then I broadened out and did triathlons and training for this Ironman. But then I, like, I broke my arm biking, so that ended up not quite happening. So I mean, they, they all kind of go in, in different directions. I learned Mandarin one year. Learned Mandarin. You can't learn Mandarin in a year.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:25:22

       [laughs] It's a challenging one.

    10. MZMark Zuckerberg1:25:23

        I mean, maybe someone can. I cannot. Um, you know, we talked about my language deficiency earlier on. But I mean, that was partially... I like, I like kind of throwing myself into things that they're hard and, you know, like, like I said before, I mean, I've I've studied a lot of languages in my life. A little Spanish, a little French, a little Hebrew, a lot of Latin, a bunch of Greek, but it's, it's actually hard for me. So I kind of like doing things that are hard for me. And, and obviously Mandarin is, is important because, yeah, Priscilla's family is Chinese, so that's... When I just... The day Priscilla and I, after dating for almost 10 years, had... We decided we didn't wanna have, like, a big wedding that a lot of people, like, we didn't want a lot of people asking us about it for a while. So we did it as a surprise wedding, and basically didn't tell anyone. And then the morning of the wedding, we're kind of telling everyone, and I, I told Priscilla's mother in Mandarin, and I never knew before that if she understood anything I was saying.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:26:20

        [laughs]

    12. MZMark Zuckerberg1:26:20

        And I just told her, and a single tear went down her face and I was like, "Okay, my Mandarin is at least good enough for that."

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:26:27

        Wow.

    14. MZMark Zuckerberg1:26:28

        Yeah. They're super interesting. A lot of them are, have a physical element, just because I, I, I tend to think, like, people focus so much on thought process, decision-making, like how can you be as smart as possible. But I, I just think, like, energy level and there hasn't been that much that's been written about, like, historical figures and energy level as opposed to how they thought. But I, I actually would be very fascinated about, about, to, to, to kind of understand that. But I, I, I think just, I mean, learning how to, how to foil surf and things like that, it's just, I mean, it's super humbling. I mean, these are, like, really hard skills.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:27:05

        It's like foiling.

    16. MZMark Zuckerberg1:27:06

        It takes, like, weeks before you can even, like, get going.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:27:08

        Really hard. [laughs]

    18. MZMark Zuckerberg1:27:09

        And I'm such a beginner, right? [laughs] And it's like, it's just wild and it's so much fun. And, you know, it's like you start off doing this, like, downwinding thing where... I mean, the, the awesome thing about the foil is, like, there's almost no friction compared to a surfboard, right? A surfboard, you need to, like-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:27:22

        Yeah

    20. MZMark Zuckerberg1:27:22

        ... be in a big wave or else, like, it, you know, you just stop. But a foil, you're just, you're kind of standing on the board, but you're actually riding this little wing, and it has no friction, so you can kind of just... Or very little friction. So you can, you can basically just ride it on open ocean swells, and it's this great workout. You just, like, can pump in between swells and, you know, your heart rate gets up to like 160, but you're... But you can go for, like, a mile or, or more and it's just, it's wild and it's a great workout, and you can't think about anything else while you are doing it-

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:27:51

        [laughs]

    22. MZMark Zuckerberg1:27:51

        ... because you will fall immediately. So learning new things is, like, I think a big part of what, what brings meaning and joy to life.

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:27:58

        We'll link to some of your annual challenges in the show notes, 'cause you, you've tackled some very hard things, [laughs] including, including Mandarin, which is, is certainly not one of the easier options out there, having, having been an East Asian studies major back

13. 1:28:12 – 1:34:22

    Navigating the metaverse

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:28:12

       in the day. All right. So I'll ask the technical question and if, if, you know, it may be boring, but then, then we'll, we'll start to wrap up right after that. This is a question from a friend who's a technologist, and he's very curious how you're thinking about computing for smart glasses. So his question was, I know this is a bit of a, a left turn yet again, but with respect to the metaverse, if the phone is one of the best places to do the computing, how do you think about navigating, say, phones that operate on OSs that you don't control? Or how are, how are you foreseeing the future of that unfolding?

    2. MZMark Zuckerberg1:28:44

       I think one of the wildest technical challenges for augmented reality is that it needs to basically, you need to fit all this stuff into essentially a normal pair of glasses. Right? So VR will always, you know, it's, it's supposed to be immersive. So I mean, maybe it'll eventually be more like ski goggles where it'll be, it'll be kind of thinner, but it's, it's not, like, meant to just look like, you know, normal glasses. Whereas augmented reality, if you're gonna wear that throughout the day, it really needs to be socially acceptable. So you're, you're basically talking about, you know, the normal frames of glasses maybe called thick rim frames, maybe five millimeters thick, right? So within that, you're talking about fitting, like, you know, what would've been called a super computer 5 or 10 years ago.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:29:24

       [laughs]

    4. MZMark Zuckerberg1:29:25

       You know, basically like a laser projector and then, uh, the, the tools to basically have that display kind of holograms with, with wave guides because in order to make sure that the image in the hologram stays synced in the right place, it needs to know where your eye position is. You need, like, lasers that understand where your eyes are, and then we need to have speakers 'cause of course you're gonna want sound. Um, it probably needs microphones 'cause you're gonna wanna have an assistant and, and talk to it. Has sort of positional tracking so that way if, like, if, you know, I'm sitting on your couch as a hologram and you move your head, I'm not moving off the couch. It, like, needs to know exactly where you're looking at. So, okay, all that stuff to do all that computation instantly in glasses that have, that are five millimeters thick. So yeah, no, I think this is, like, one of the wildest technical challenges of the next, you know, 10 or 15 years, which is why I'm, I'm, I'm so excited about it. I think that there's this odd thing where I, I think sometimes people get really inspired by physically big things, but I actually think miniaturizing things to be tiny is in a lot of ways even a harder challenge. So this is a lot of the work that's, that's gonna happen. Will it be valuable to have another phone or something like that? I don't know. Maybe. I, I think that there are, you know, it's on, on the one hand you can offload computing, so that's good. One of the biggest things that basically is a limiting factor is actually heat dissipation. So if you have a processor-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:30:46

       Mm

    6. MZMark Zuckerberg1:30:47

       ... that's running on your glasses and it's getting hot, it's like you're making your face kind of warm and that's, um, uncomfortable. So if you can have that in your pocket, that's better. But on the flip side, you need to find a way to get all that stuff to the glasses and back, and wireless chips are actually pretty energy intensive too. So you're gonna always have some computation on the glasses. The kind of equilibrium I don't think is to have all of the computation somewhere else. And then you start getting into this interesting trade-off, which is, okay, well, if you're Apple and you have the iPhone, is that an advantage? And I, I think that there are, there are a bunch of different questions in that. One is basically to what extent are they just going to advantage their own devices, or they're going to make it so that some of the APIs are open? And I think that this is somewhat of a regulatory question, right? It's like are they going to be allowed-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:31:36

       Yeah, for sure

    8. MZMark Zuckerberg1:31:36

       ... to just make something that has You know, they have a billion iPhones out there. Are they gonna, you know, is, are, are basically are the, are the kind of regulated, regulatory agencies around the world going to allow them to just, like, only make it so that their glasses work with their thing? It would seem to me like that there would be an issue with that. But then there's this other issue, which is if you were designing a secondary device for, say, input or something like that, it probably wouldn't look like a phone exactly, right? So I think when new computing platforms come around, people tend to assume that the incumbents are... That that model is sort of gonna work and that whatever the new thing is just sort of a peripheral to that existing platform. But I think it, it, it kinda depends. You know, it's like maybe the watch is more of a peripheral to your phone, but I would guess that augmented and virtual reality are so fundamentally different that whatever you want in your constellation of devices, you probably want it to be designed specifically for that and not just like, okay, you happen to have a phone, so now let's shoehorn it into, into doing augmented reality too. So I think that there's, like, a lot of interesting questions in this. But I don't know, at the end of the day, I, I think that there's, like, a, just a ton to be invented, and there are a lot of different ways that this could go.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:32:48

       Thank you, Mark. And I appreciate you taking so much time in what is an incredibly busy week, I can only imagine. Is there anything else that you would like to touch on? Any requests to the audience? Uh, anything at all that you'd like to chat about or mention before we bring this to a close?

    10. MZMark Zuckerberg1:33:05

        I mean, this was a pretty wide-ranging conversation.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:33:07

        [laughs]

    12. MZMark Zuckerberg1:33:08

        I've never had someone start by asking me about fencing, and I don't think I've ever done an interview where we've talked, or a podcast, where we've talked so much about sports. I mean, I don't know. I feel like we could do a whole nother one of these.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:33:18

        I feel like we could. [laughs]

    14. MZMark Zuckerberg1:33:19

        I mean, we didn't go into science at all or curing diseases.

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:33:22

        I know. I know. I have a lot of notes left.

    16. MZMark Zuckerberg1:33:25

        There's a whole, whole nother session on that, maybe, like, another couple of hours at some point.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:33:29

        Yeah, for sure.

    18. MZMark Zuckerberg1:33:30

        But this has, this has been a lot of fun, so thank you for having me on.

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:33:34

        Of course. I really appreciate you being on and, uh, making the time for it. And to everybody listening, we'll also link to everything in the show notes certainly. And if there are any additional resources, Mark, that you or your team would like to put in the show notes, we can add those in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And certainly, people can find you online rather easily, I would say. Facebook, Zuck, Instagram/zuck, and, uh, uh, of course people can find Meta at meta.com. And it's been fun to have a wide-ranging conversation. And as expected, I have many, many pages of, of topics left that we could cover and, and, uh, certainly the, the science and research side is something that, you know, if the opportunity presents itself, I'd love to get into at some point. But I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation, Mark.

    20. MZMark Zuckerberg1:34:21

        Well, it's been fun. Thanks for having me.

Episode duration: 1:34:44