Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

Andrew Bosworth—or Boz, as most people know him—is the chief technology officer at Meta and head of Reality Labs, the company’s augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) organization, which he created in 2017. Boz joined Facebook in 2006 as their approximately 10th engineer, and in his 18-year tenure he built the original News Feed, Messenger, and Groups, as well as many early anti-abuse and infrastructure systems. At various times he has been the engineering director overseeing Events, Places, Photos, Videos, Timeline, Privacy, and more. Before Reality Labs, he ran the Ads and Business Platform product group, where he led engineering, product, research, analytics, and design, taking annual revenue from $4 billion to $40 billion in five years. Andrew currently leads Meta’s efforts in AR, VR, AI, and consumer hardware across Quest, Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and more. In our conversation, we discuss: • Stories from the early days of Facebook • Lessons from Meta’s downturn and recent turnaround • Meta’s culture of transparency • Boz’s thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro • Why communication is the job • Why you should regularly seek help from your manager • Lessons in setting incentives and avoiding their misuse • Why you should optimize for a variety in experience in your career • The importance of trusting your own expertise and not being swayed by external opinions • Stories of failures and personal growth — Brought to you by: • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny • Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/ • Explo—Embed customer-facing analytics in your product: https://explo.co/lenny Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/making-meta-andrew-boz-bosworth-cto Where to find Andrew Bosworth: • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boz/ • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boztank/ • X: https://twitter.com/boztank • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-bosworth-8247a01/ • Website: https://boz.com/ • Photography website: https://wardenshortbow.com/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Boz’s background (04:48) Fun facts about him (07:20) Early days at Facebook (11:11) Advice for founders (13:22) Leveraging leaders (19:27) Tips for communicating with managers (22:10) Transparency at Meta (27:01) The importance of clear guidelines (29:11) Involvement in the details (33:15) Building the News Feed (37:28) Passion and career growth (40:25) Exploring new opportunities (42:02) The value of variety in experience (45:01) Giving and receiving feedback (47:38) Boz’s tattoos (51:30) Communication is the job (01:00:47) Comparing VR headsets: Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro (01:10:41) Meta’s downturn and turnaround (01:16:10) Navigating org changes (01:20:43) Lessons from failure (01:26:33) Closing thoughts (01:29:57) Lightning round Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  You were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook. Imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering that people don't often hear about.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  I didn't sleep for more than four hours at a time. I'd wake up every four hours and check the report and see if anyone was attacking the site. They don't tell you about that stuff in the movies.

• 0:13Lenny Rachitsky?

  You worked 120 hours per week. You had no hobbies.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  I don't want to take away from the romanticism of it. It's just that it's most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes. It's a healthy thing for people to want to throw themselves into something and take that risk, but it is not glamorous, like at the time.

• 0:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  The newsfeed, that was one of your early projects at Facebook. People did not want it. They were wrong, clearly.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Now, newsfeed was an easier case than people suspect. Everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product.

• 0:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  In terms of the economic utility, the Venn diagram of Boz of newsfeed and ads created a trillion dollars of value.

• 0:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Andrew Bosworth, or Boz, as most people know him. Boz is the Chief Technology Officer of Meta. He joined what was then called Facebook in early 2006 as one of the first engineers. And during his 18-year tenure at Meta, he created some of the most impactful and important products in internet history, including the Facebook newsfeed, which was the first ever algorithmically ranked content feed of any social network and is basically what people think of as Facebook today. He also built the original Facebook mobile apps platform, which he then ran for another four years. He also helped build and scale the Facebook messaging system, the profile, the timeline, Facebook groups, and even the internal engineering bootcamp.

• 1:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Most recently, he served as VP of Ads and Business Platform, where he led engineering, product, research, analytics, and design. And in 2017, he created the company's AR/VR organization, now called Reality Labs. These days, Andrew leads Meta's efforts in AR, VR, and mixed reality, along with consumer hardware across Quest, Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and more. In our wide-ranging conversation, we touch on so many important lessons and stories. What it was really like in the early days of Facebook, why you should be asking your manager for help more often, why communication is the job, lessons from Meta's turnaround over the past couple of years, Boz's thoughts on Apple Vision Pro, a bunch of leadership and career advice,

• 2:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  what it was like to build the very first newsfeed and lessons from that experience, and stories of failure and stories of success, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Andrew Bosworth, aka Boz, after a short word from our sponsors.

• 2:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market-leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews.

• 3:21Lenny Rachitsky?

  Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by EPO. EPO is a next-generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on EPO to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform,

• 4:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. EPO does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and Out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/leni and 10x your experiment velocity. That's get E P P O dot com slash leni.

• 4:51Lenny Rachitsky?

  Boz, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. I've been a longtime fan of your program and all the things that you've been putting out. So I'm glad to finally get a chance to join.

• 5:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Same. I'm really excited to have you here. I have at least a billion questions I want to ask you. But I want to start with a few fun facts that I've found about you. And what if I go through them and then just pick one that stands out and then tell the story behind it? How does that sound?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  All right. Sounds good.

• 5:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. You went to 14 proms.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, I'm gonna keep going. Okay.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a strong opener.

• 5:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  I might do the run. You're a national Taekwondo champion in college. You were Mark Zuckerberg's TA in college in a class on AI, which isn't actually how you landed at Facebook, from my understanding. Harvard was recruiting you to play football for them. You were very active in the 4H club and you raised animals and showed them at county fairs when you were growing up. You once shared a stage with David Copperfield.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 5:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  MC Hammer once told you that your outfit was stylish. And President George W. Bush complimented you on your shoes and the shine of your head.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are all, these are all true. I want to say, wow. First of all, I gotta make sure that people understand I was a national collegiate champion in as a green belt, which is like a very, that's like being the JV champion, just so everyone's, just so everyone's clear on what that is.

• 6:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  W is a W.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Heavyweight, heavyweight sparring. I'll tell the prom story is a funny one. It's related to the 4H story. It was a big time 4Her, National 4H, kind of Hall of Fame, did all this stuff there. As a consequence to that, I was, you know, it's Co-4H is a wonderful program, youth program. It's a coed program and I was all over the state, all over the country, doing, you know, leadership events and doing these conferences and doing a lot of public speaking. And almost every 4H event has a dance. I don't know that they have like at the end of like the conference, at the end of the, of the literally like camp, you'd go camping for a week, at the end, there's a dance. And so as a consequence, the most important thing, if you want to go to a lot of proms, I was a good dancer. And it turns out when like the high level bit, at least in the 1990s, for girls selecting

• 6:59Speaker 01

  who they might want to go to prom with was, will he and can he dance? And the answer with me was yes. And then combine that with the fact that I knew a bunch of girls who went to different schools. That's the recipe for success right there. If that's, if that's the goal that somebody has, two my junior year and 12 my senior year. I went with the three in one weekend, a Friday, a Saturday and a Sunday night.

• 7:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  Another fun fact about you is you were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook initially, way before it was this clear success story. Imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering and struggle that people don't often hear about those early days. They see a movie like The Social Network, it looks like, oh, that was so much fun. I gotta start a company. It's gonna be, become a trillion dollar success story. I'm curious just what those early days were like. Are there memories that stand out to you?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a bit of a joke in the 10th thing, which is me and five other guys all joined at the same time and there was nine people, nine engineers before us, we joined the same day, so we're all the 10th engineer. So somewhere between 10 and 16, depending on how you want, how you want to do the numeration on that. I've written this, this is my blog and I tell this story a lot, which is, it was fun and there was tremendous camaraderie and, you know, memories that were formed, but they were formed in a kind of a forge of really intense times. You know, at that time, almost all of us lived within one mile of the office. We ate most of our meals together because we were working, not because, I'd say that we weren't also friends, but like because we were working, it's like, oh, cool. It's like just roll into a meal and roll back into work. And there's little things that you don't appreciate, which is like, there was nobody to help you, there was no expert.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And so it wasn't like, hey, I'm struggling with this one tricky problem, who should I talk to? It's like, nobody, you should talk to yourself and figure this out. Or it's like, oh, man, like my servers are out of capacity. It's like, cool, you should go to Fry's Electronics, you should buy a bunch of components, you should build a new server and then you should run it. Uh, like maybe drive into the colo racket and then get back and run it. That, people really undervalue the fact that

• 8:55Speaker 01

  When you go to work, even a moderate midsize corporation today, especially with the tremendous growth of startups supporting startups, things like payroll and finance and IT and HR. And you know, these things are professionally handled in many cases. That was just not the case in the early 2000s. It was just like you and like your personal car and like whatever you wanted to do with your time. So I don't want to take away from the romanticism of it. It's just that it's most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes. We so rarely hear somebody who went through really sacrificing a lot of my twenties from any kind of social or you know, like outgoing fun environment. It paid off for me, so no one feels bad for me, nor should they.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  But there are other people who do the exact same thing. Maybe they worked harder, maybe they were smarter, maybe they did better and it didn't play out for them. And it's a big sacrifice. And so I like, I love that people, I love the enthusiasm for startups. I love startup culture. I think it's a, it's a healthy thing for people to want to throw themselves into something and take that risk, but it is not glamorous like at the time. In retrospect, it's like, oh, it can be like, we have a little halo around it, but at the time it doesn't feel glamorous.

• 10:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. In this post, you mentioned, you said that you worked 120 hours per week. You had no hobbies and you gained a lot of weight and you, and yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  We drank, we drank a lot to make up, to make up for it. So like, you know, a lot of, yeah, you weren't eating healthy. It was, it was, it was crazy. There's a time, I think I said, I've told this before, that there was a time where one of the first things I built was an anti spam, kind of anti scraping defense mechanism. But we didn't have any ops support. There was no like 24 seven online support. So I built this tool. I had to wake up every four hours for about two years. I didn't sleep for more than four hours at a time. I'd wake up every four hours and check the report and see if anyone was attacking the site. And if they were, I was up and I had to go battle back. And if they weren't cool, I'd go back to sleep. But that's, that's, they don't tell you about that stuff in the movies, you know?

• 10:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's like worse, almost as worse, worse than having a kid, a new, a newborn.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And nobody asked me to do it. It was just like, I, that was like, I took it up, but nobody even asked me to do the anti spam, anti scraping stuff. I just like, that was a problem and I went and did that. And that was the solution I came up with. If I was a better engineer, maybe I'd have solved a better problem, but.

• 11:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  So maybe just to close out that thread, when you talk to founders, what advice do you give them along these lines?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I want to be cautious about this because I, you know, what I tell founders, the first thing I tell founders is that I've never been a founder and I want to recognize the difference. Like, you know, I joined in January 9th, 2006. That's almost two years after Mark started the company. I didn't have to do, I wasn't involved in fundraising. I didn't have to do any of that side of the things. And I didn't have to deal with, you know, the board or, or like the business side of things. I really was lucky in a way to have joined when I did. That's the first thing I tell founders is like, you should take my advice with a grain of salt. I have not actually been in your shoes. If I can compliment you really, one of the things I like about your program is there's a whole system of professionals in our industry. And I was, when I grew up in technology in the valley, right? You always heard about like the ACM, right?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  The Association of Computing Machinery. You're having these legendary professional organizations that supported people in our fields. And by the nature of the rapid pace of change in the technology and the nature of the engagement of those institutions, even academics, even academia broadly, kind of are out of touch. The, the tools that you got from those places weren't useful in our field. So I do think the mentorship that we give each other has been a critical and sustaining resource. There is today now, resources like your, your, your podcast and your newsletter that are actually really designed to help people who are professionals in our industry in a way that has almost kind of missing for 15, 20 years.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  I love to see that because if you're an up and coming pianist, literally you used to have to know somebody and ask them a question. And so a lot of times what I'm helping founders with, I can help them with the strategy. I can help them think through the technology choices. I can think through business, I can think through the management, the organization structure. But I also try to be very clear, there's a bunch of stuff that I just was never had to expose. So even as we just talked about how tough it was for the average engineer joining, you know, Facebook in 2006. Man, it was even tougher for Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, probably. And that's not that that's a story that's been told, I'm sure, but still. So I think these are both, it's just like, it's almost all scale and variant. No matter how far you dial back, the challenges kind of are interesting and are worth talking about.

• 13:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  One of maybe your most popular posts is this quote that you share about the advice you often give. What you say is, "The advice I find I have to give more frequently than any other in my career as a manager, a board member, an advisor, and a friend is that it's for people to more directly leverage their leaders."

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:37Lenny Rachitsky?

  Can you talk about that and what that means and what that looks like?

• 13:40Speaker 01

  It's such a normal and natural, healthy thing. And by the way, we do it in our personal relationships, like I said in the post, like we want to do it ourselves. We want to do it ourselves to prove to everyone that we can do it ourselves. And we think in our heads, if I ask for help, haven't I already given up that goal? Haven't I just admitted defeat on one of my top level goals? Which is to demonstrate that I can do it myself. But what so often we forget is like, more often than not, your job is not to do it yourself. Your job is to get it done, is to have the thing done, done well, done right, done competently. And a lot of times, the tools that you need to do that live with your, your manager, with your partner, with your advisor, with your mentor. Like, that's where they live.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  So it's like, you know, how many times as a manager have I gone through and somebody's,

• 14:30Speaker 01

  you know, I've told them, here's the job. They're like, I got it. They go off, they come back, it's done, it's wrong. And I'm not blaming them for it being wrong. They didn't check in with me, they misunderstood, we miscommunicated. I'll take the L on that, that's no problem. But here we are, six months later, it's not done right. Because they misunderstood the brief, we miscommunicated with the brief. Or they come back and it took a year. And I'm like, why did this take a year instead of six months? And they're like, oh, man, I had all these things I had to deal with. Where if they had emailed me, I could have bulldozed that stuff. I could have cleared the path. I could have said, oh, no, no, no, don't worry about that. This is the thing. And then we'd have been done six months sooner and they would have been less frustrated. And so, light touches. Now, I do think as a manager, we also have a job to say, hey, you know, that's kind of the, that's kind of the work. So you gotta go figure that out.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  And one of my things I always tell my managers is one of the most powerful things we do is refuse to rule. Someone will bring me a thing. A lot of times we feel obligated to like weigh in and help. I'll be like, nope. Uh, like, I think you've got it. Like, I think the challenges you're facing are the right challenges. I think you're approaching it the right way. Like, just do your best there. And like, that's what it is. And so there is a responsibility as well for those of us who are leaders, mentors, advisors, board members, to do that. But by the way, we do this in a personal relationships, right? Like, you're with your partner and you're trying to do something the right way, but you're not talking to them about it. You're just taking a huge risk there and for very little reward. Like, they're not gonna be mad if you ask them, like, hey, do you want to, is this how you wanted it done? Like, I don't know. And so I do think it's kind of funny how

• 15:59Speaker 01

  much we build these castles in our mind, these little silos that keep us from engaging the structures that are built around us, that are designed to help us succeed. I saw this great quote, actually, just yesterday, I saw Patrick Stewart, who was one of my favorite actors of all time and whose characters I love. And he talked about people going on casting calls. And this is a brutal thing for actors, right? You're going on 30, 40 things, you're getting rejected, it's tough. Everyone's kind of heard about this. And he said, no one wants you to succeed more than the person you are auditioning for. Because they want you to be awesome. Because as soon as you're awesome, they're done. Like, they want you to be amazing. That's like your manager. You, nobody wants you to be more awesome than your manager does. Because when you're amazing, your manager,

• 16:42Speaker 01

  his life gets easier, her life gets easier. So I just think that's like the mentality we get into is like, no, no, no, like, they're testing me. They're not. They are rooting for you. I promise you that.

• 16:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that advice. I imagine the reason people don't do this, as you said, is they don't want their managers to think they don't know what they're doing, or they can't solve it. Do you have any advice and guidance for when it makes sense to go reach out and ask?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  One of the things I think for people who are timid about this, especially, is I think you can put a framing around it that's really easy for your manager to like engage with. You can say like, hey, I'm making progress on this. This is what I'm blocked on. This is the current program. And I'll even say like, hey, if this all looks good to you, no response required. If there is something here that you want me to do better, different, that you think you could help with, you know, let me know.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  I love like a tight, you know, like a five, 10 sentence email, no response required. Here's where things are. Even if I, even if everything is going really well. I feel, am I cool? This is a, this is a, this person understands the urgency, they understand the assignment. And they're giving me a little heartbeat, a little ping back. And then also if two weeks later, let's say the blocking issue is bad. Then you say, hey, I am sorry, but I do actually need your help now. I'm actually blocked on this thing. I have the context. You, like, I have a mental model of you, uh, you know, toiling away on the right thing, on the thing I asked you to do over there. Even then, when you're blocked, you can make my life super easy.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Like, hey, what I'd love for you to do, if you could send an email to this person, here's a draft. With like this thoughts, that would help. Or it's like, here's, here are specific questions framed up. Like, I think this is what you want. Is this right? Yes or no? If no, okay, we'll come back and we'll spend more time. If yes, we're all good. It makes it so it's now, it's like, not only am I up to speed, I have a mental model, I'm engaged. Also, you've made it super cheap for me to help you. I just like takes it. And people are always surprised, people at, it's, the people who work for me are always surprised when I tell them how big a part of my job is doing these little types of things. It's a little spinning plates at my scale. I've got 10 or 15,000 employees, depending on how you want to count different things.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  And so you're just like, I, every now and then I gotta get a whole new plate, a whole new rod and just really put the effort into it. For the most part, I'm just like trying to touch everything and keep the momentum going. And so if something falls and somebody didn't tell me that, hey, we're losing rotational velocity here. We got, we're losing momentum. Oh, I'm bummed. I'm like, ah, now that plate fell, I gotta start a whole new thing over here now. So I think people underestimate, they think of my job differently than my job actually. My job is actually tons of little touches.

• 19:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  So I think a key takeaway here is one index more towards asking your manager and leaders for help. And I love this way of framing it of doesn't always need to be like, here's what I need from you. It's here's what's happening. Here's things that might be blocking me. Here's questions I have. Here's things that are going on. This is actually similar to something I found really powerful that I'll share real quickly. This idea of a state of I call it the state of Lenny email. And I sent this email to my manager every week. The state of Lenny, it's kind of like state of the union. And it's, here's my current priorities. Here's what's on my mind broadly. And then here's blockers that I need your help with.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  We actually used to have a format for that. We called HPMs, highlight people me. And every manager at Facebook from like 2008 to like 2014 would send to their manager or even their leadership group. I mean, at one point when I was running what we called com apps, I just sent it to like Zuck and the whole leadership group. It's like, what's the highlights include? And it highlights a threshold like, like, what's the big ticket things you need to know? Where are people? Like, is somebody in trouble? Is somebody at risk? Is somebody doing really amazing work that needs a shout out? And then me, how are you personally doing? HPMs, we call them. Actually, it's funny. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. But yeah, no, I think this kind of thing can work. And look, everyone manager is different. So you that's even at the meta level, by the way, is another

• 20:46Speaker 01

  success. I don't know if people think people do is they want to treat every manager the same. And that's not gonna work because every manager is different. So but every manager you can ask, how do you like to get updates? Like, you can ask them when you first start working with them, like, hey, like, what's your cadence? Like, how do you like, how do you like to stay informed? And so for me, like, I do regular one on ones, as I've gotten the org's gotten bigger, those have gotten more distant. So people have replaced those with more written things. But like, no manager will get pissed if you was like, how do you like to get information about me? Like, that's a totally reasonable thing to ask.

• 21:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love the specific idea you shared of just like drafting the email to say the other team leader of like, here's what I need you to tell them that would really unblock this thing. That's such a cool idea.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  By the way, and I always put my own, I don't take that copy paste it like, you know, I'm always looking at that and be like, okay, I understand. A lot of it is actually not about what you want the other person to hear. It's about like the voice, the tone. It includes a lot of history. I don't know. Have you been going back and forth with them for 12 rounds and this is going to feel to them like I'm really come over the top? Or is this like, hey, first time you're hearing about this, my bad. Like, here's what we're doing. Need your help. So a lot of it isn't even about, oh, here, making my life easy because I want to copy paste. A lot of it is actually, there's a rich set of information in how you tone and how you draft that note. That's going to help me land it correctly and not feel like I'm just out of band, you know, heavy coming in.

• 22:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  This touches on something that I often hear is very core to the way Meta works, which is transparency. Anyone can ask Zuck questions at the Q and A's. People are encouraged to post constantly internally of what they're thinking, what they're working on. All the data is shared publicly, which often leads to leaks, which I hear you're very, you hate, and that is a pet peeve of yours.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Just feels like a violation of the team trust. Just feels like, I grew up with playing sports, right? Football, soccer, track. And like, you just can't imagine one of your guys like calling out the play to the other team. It's like, can you, can you imagine what you would do in that case? Like, I just, you're off the team. I'm sorry. Like, you can't be here. Anyway, sorry, carry on.

• 22:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. And there's so many more people. It's hard to find, who is this? So with this downside as an example, and it's also, I mentioned, there's other downsides, also takes a lot of work, and it puts people on the spot a lot of times. What have you seen as benefits? And why is that such a big part of Meta's way of working?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, this comes back to, I think, the principle that really good, talented people, you want to leverage them fully. You really want to make sure that they are fully leveraged. And so anytime they have the wrong information or they don't have the information, you've now blocked one of the economically most valuable things that your company possesses, which is this person's time, attention, talent. Not only that, you've also made them more frustrated, and now they like are more likely to leave. Like, if, if, if the lifeblood of any company are the people inside of it who collectively commit to some kind of a goal and mission and work together, then like, you want to maximize that potential. And

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Creating this like really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that. So often, great phenomenal work that has happened at our company has not come from this one top-down mandate, but it's come from people understanding not just like what we're trying to accomplish top-down, but also having way more information at their disposal to be able to act on it. And so it's, you know, people will talk about top-down or bottoms-up culture. It's a bit of a myth, in my opinion. If you've ever met Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a, it's not a bottoms-up thing. Like, the ideas that we're pursuing are Mark Zuckerberg's ideas, first and foremost. That's not to say that he's not open to new ones, and of course he is. And that's a form of bottom-up.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  People can bring ideas to him and he internalizes them and acts them or not. But when he brings it things top-down, he doesn't, he's not micromanaging. He's in the details, I'll be careful on that. But he does create the space for you to bring back three or four versions of the thing that he's talking about. And then he shapes it from there. And you can't do that if there's, if you don't have degrees of freedom, sure. But also if you don't have the information. Otherwise, if you don't have the information available, what we're trying to accomplish, why we're trying to do it, what the, what the, what the infrastructure is like, what the availability is like, what the performance is going to be like. Well, you just are stuck. You're just gonna have to follow the script. That's very boring for high talent, high creativity, high engaged people. Now, it does come at a tremendous price.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  You have to get really good at managing information on the incoming. Most people at most companies

• 25:24Speaker 01

  consume all the information that's given to them, but the information itself is carefully managed. Right? Like, they're getting all the information they're intended to get. We've turned that on its head, and it sounds great, but it's not free. Even somebody senior coming from outside the company to the company, one of the things I have to coach them on is like, how do you find signal amongst all the noise? You have to have a system for managing your information. You have to have a system for triaging the incoming.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Getting rid of a bunch of stuff that is on the wrong channel or it doesn't matter to you. Figuring out what's the groups that you want to be a part of, but you consume only when you choose to. And where are the things where you're getting push notices? Like that's the real time thing. And that takes some time.

• 26:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  This point you made about bottom up versus top down is really interesting because when I think of meta, I think it's a very bottom up culture. I hear everyone comes up with their ideas, runs experiments. It's very encouraged to just try stuff. And it's really interesting to hear that. And it's makes a lot of sense that most of the big ideas actually do come from the top.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  It's a bit, it's just like, it's one of these mythology things. I don't think it's the wrong, as a, as a construct, it's more bottoms up than many other companies. Because you do have these degrees of freedom within the construct. But like, make no mistake, like Mark or me or Chris Cox or Javi, like they have very strong opinions about what we should be doing as a company. And you have to, your bottoms upness works within that framework. But we're also, it is true that you can ask Mark any question and he's going to answer it. Same with me, same with Chris, same with Javi. And also that like, we certainly take inspiration from the discussion that we have with employees. So it's, I don't know, it's, it's just not a black and white as people kind of tend to paint it.

• 27:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think one of the biggest lessons here is making it at least feel like you have a lot of say. Like even though a company is very, here's the big strategic pillars we're into. You're very good at making people feel like they can have an impact in a site.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  And can I tell you, the most important thing is just giving people clear guidelines. So they know where they, where, like where can they, where do they have space? And where do they have no space? You know, one of the things that we go in these reviews of Mark or my team with me, I'm sure. And I'm like, this is weird, like for this part of the UI, it is going to be like, I will draw it for you. It's going to be like this. And this other part, I'm like, cool, that's important too. I don't have a clear vision of it. Why don't you do it? So you like, so there's just really clear guardrails of like, okay, like where are we just on assignment? And where do we have more flexibility?

• 27:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there an example of that that comes to mind where you're just like very in the details and drawing the screen?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Over the course of time, there's been quite a few examples. I think early on when we were working on News Feed, you know, Mark was absolutely whiteboarding every single like pixel that, you know, the team had to put on the front end. On the back end, he was like, make it rank, like have some ranking, you know? So I felt like I was lucky there because I was just like, cool. Like I'm off to the races on some ranking stuff and like, you know, all these other Chris Cox and all these other guys were having to like really pixel match these things. But it's not always that way, by the way. So now fast forward and we're talking about ranking. It's not like Mark is always hands off on that. When we got into modernizing our ranking systems, which we've done over the last five years, Mark was heavily involved in like, hey, what's the, what's the mix shift and how are you weighing different things?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it can go both ways. For me personally, I've gotten really involved in kind of some, some relatively esoteric things. I was really adamant, for example, that hand tracking and mixed reality make it into the headset. I said that there weren't any supporters in the team. Obviously we had a hand tracking team, which is phenomenal, mixed reality team. But like, there was a lot of people who were like, they did not feel those features were going to be critical for this to become a mainstream device. I always believed that they were for ease of use and for, so like, I just like really forced the issue and didn't give anyone any room. And held really high standards for the performance benchmarks. We were going to hit on, on the hand tracking and teams told me it was impossible. And it wasn't. They did great.

• 29:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  This touches on something that comes up a lot on this podcast and there's this debate between how in the weeds founders and execs should be, whether they delegate and power versus, no, we're just going to do it this way. I'm going to be very involved in every mock. And there's always this like up and down that happens where it's like, okay, cool. We're going to let people run and do their thing. And then things start to not work as well often. And then, cool, we're going to take, take back control. Do you have just a perspective on when it makes sense to go deep, how founders, execs should think about that?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Such a useless answer for founders. It depends on the weeds, like, you know, like there are some weeds that really matter and there are some weeds that really just don't. And I should say like, that doesn't mean they don't matter at all. You have to do them. But like they aren't the hinge upon which success or failure will happen. Yeah, like there's people I really respect. Brian Chesky's been on and said like, look, The Airbnb is going to work only on the things that I can work on. Like it's just that's the extent of what it's going to do. And that's a super extreme form of it. I have a lot of respect for him and how they're working things. I think that like, if you have great, super talented people that you can trust, who can own bigger pieces, that's one option.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  If there are ways to structure it so that you can like, check in effectively and make sure that it's on track, that's another way to structure it. And there probably is still work happening at Airbnb that has to happen. Finance and accounting and HR that like, Brian isn't personally managing. So there are clearly non-technical areas that we do, illegal. There are areas that we already, we do trust that this is happening at. And so I, I think a lot of founders regret delegating too much from what I, you know, my conversations. And I totally get that. Or they delegated something critical that really turned out to be the most important thing. For me, the judgment is like, how do you most important determine what is what matters the most? And so Mark, we, we joke inside of Meta, to this day, we call it the eye of Sauron.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  When Mark has determined that the thing that you're working on is the most important thing, there is no detail too small for him to notice. Like, uh, he will be in a review and in the same review will be like, strategically, I think we're off course. And also this one pixel is, is definitely wrong. You have to fix that. Like, you know, that's a big range. And frankly, if I, I'll be so a little bit self-congratulatory, I pride myself on being able to do the same. And I think people who work with me often comment that the style of leadership that we have, and I think Chris Cox is the same, is that where it's like, we will go high to low on the things that matter a ton. And there's a bunch of other things that certainly matter.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Like, we're glad we're doing them, but either they have pretty clear roadmaps, pretty clear examples in the industry, or it's like, that's a feature that you have to have, but isn't going to determine success or failure. So getting it into rough shape and then iterating on it is fine. And so that's, I think it really does depend on the weeds, how deep you want to get.

• 32:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's so funny. I use exactly that same metaphor, the eye of Sauron, when I talk about working on things at Airbnb that matter a lot to Brian. And my advice to people is you don't want to be in that eye of Sauron for too long in your career because you're just going to burn out if you're working on the most important thing all the time. But you want to be close. You don't want to be in the Shire, but you want to be like around.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  That's right. They're both. So I worked for years in ads. From 2012, 2017, I ran ads in business platform, this big ads group. And it was an area where certainly it was very important. But Mark had so many other things going on with the transition to mobile. He did kind of delegate to me and it was awesome. And it was so cool to have that kind of, you know, trust from him. And also you're constantly terrified because like Mark does not know. Like what if this is all, you know, it's like, and my leads be worried. It's like they just hadn't had a review with Mark in a while. And it's like, yeah, you suffer in the intensity of the gaze of Sauron. You also suffer in the shadow of its absence. There's no perfect place to be.

• 33:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's hilarious. I'm trying to think of like the part of Middle Earth that has a metaphor for that.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. So you talked about the newsfeed, which was one of your very earliest projects at Facebook. Here's a couple of fun facts I know about the newsfeed. One is that it was the very first algorithmic newsfeed of its kind of any social network and maybe of any sort of product like this.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:32Lenny Rachitsky?

  And two is the very first AI code that was written at Facebook to rank the actual newsfeed. So there were a lot of firsts and clearly this became a huge deal. The newsfeed is essentially what people think of when they think of Facebook now. But it was super controversial when it came out. People were very against this. They did not want to be sharing this much information. And people are so they thought, and then they realized eventually, oh, this is actually exactly what I want. What did you learn from going through that experience of building something that people initially reject? And then later realize that they actually do want this and this is exactly what they're waiting for?

• 34:08Speaker 01

  This is a story that you tell a lot, actually, in through your interviews, which is just like, you have to have conviction in what you're building. You're choosing your customers as much as your customers are choosing you is one way I think about it sometimes. And one mistake that you do see sometimes startups make is they get an early cohort of users whose needs actually take them kind of orthogonal to a larger market. And so they become kind of held hostage by their earliest customers. Now, so we've time and time again, we've had a vision for what we thought this should look like. And it wasn't the thing we were delivering right now. And so people who are using the thing we currently had, we're not sure that that changes what they wanted. But we had a confidence that over time they would and we don't, we're not always right, but in these cases we were right.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Now, News Feed was an easier case than people suspect because everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product. So, so we had a few advantages there, which was there was literally like, everyone was like, I hate this so much. And they would refresh, refresh, refresh. And so we were like, okay, wait, this is a, there's cognitive dissonance here between what the stated preferences and what the revealed preferences are in the economic sense. So News Feed was a little easier than people suspect to stick with. But people sometimes misunderstand that. They think, oh, the lesson is don't listen to your customers, not at all. And we certainly care tremendously about, and even with News Feed, we did actually screw some things up. I kind of always make this joke that it's almost like, you know, you're near at the party and music's loud, you're talking to somebody.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And then music cuts out right when you're saying something at a super high volume. And so everyone in the party hears the last thing you said. Now, you were saying it in a public place, so it wasn't like it was a private comment. But you also didn't mean to broadcast it at that volume. We kind of did that to the entire user base because we took what had been wall posts, which sure, anybody could have gone to that profile and seen, and then put it kind of on blast, like on main, you know, as the kids say these days, put it on main. And someone's like, ah, you know, so we did that. We, I do think we like, I don't want to say like we, we did screw things up. Like, it wasn't like, oh, this is a clause execution. So another thing to know is like, when did you screw something small up? And when did you do something big up? Like, when is the thing itself wrong versus when were the details wrong? That is an art. That is a real art.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  And you don't always have user data to determine it like we did. And so a lot of that is, do you have a clear vision and intuition for what you expected to happen? And then what happened instead? And can you diagnose the delta there? So the newsfeed case, we made a bunch of little mistakes. The thing itself was right. And I really am quite proud of the work we did there. You know, me and Chris Cox, at the most core, probably in the engineering side, which you saw on the PM. Like, there was no ranked feeds before that. We did have some AI that I'd built before for the anti-scam, anti-things, but it was pretty rudimentary. So it was probably the first consumer AI that was in a website of that kind around content. And we built like the most efficient monetizing surface in history outside of search, I think.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  And for those who are curious, I don't use monetization because I think money is the most important thing. I do think it suggests the economic power you've created, which I do think correlates very strongly with human utility. Although, you know, obviously I respect that some people may disagree.

• 37:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah. In terms of the economic utility, the Venn diagram of newsfeed and ads created a trillion dollars of value. So well done.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  It's not nothing. Not nothing. We're proud of that work.

• 37:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  You have this quote in one of your posts about the newsfeed where you said, "It consumed me more fully than anything in life had ever consumed me. It opened up to me the truth that when you're passionate about something, you do better work. You do smarter work and you're an order of magnitude more productive."

• 37:43Speaker 01

  There's no substitute for it. And one thing I've learned about myself since that post, actually, is just the degree to which I am somebody who is inclined to be passionate about things. And that's a gift that I'm very lucky to have. And I understand that's not every person. And so like, actually, the ads thing is a good example. When Mark told me to go work on ads, I was like, no, I don't want to. I don't think I have a passion for that. I had this idea of myself, I had a very strong identity of myself as this like AI infrastructure product guy. And I was like, working in this space. And nope, I was wrong. I just like, I'm a guy who gets excited about things. And once I got into ads, it's, oh, this is fascinating. It's a three-sided marketplace and there's all these different, it was like a real, you know, it felt like I was playing chess at times in terms of the moves with other players in the industry. And I was like, super pumped about that. And then when I, he wanted me to work on hardware.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  I was like, no, I'm not. I'm a software guy. I'm a software guy, Mark. And I've, no, I love this work. I just like, that's such a fascinating space that I mean, I've learned so much. So I do think that's right. I do think when I find something I'm passionate about, that's good. What I have learned since then is to give myself the space to understand if I can get passionate about it. Now, there are parts of jobs that I've had before where I just never found the passion. And after six months, I just have to move on. I literally, it's like, I'll either quit, get fired, like I'm doing bad work. I don't care about the work, you know? And so I do have a self-awareness. It's not that I can get passionate about anything, but I do have a pretty broad palette, it turns out.

• 39:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  I think that's a really interesting career lesson of don't assume you won't be excited about something that may come up. Is there anything there that you'd share with folks of just like, explore it, give it six months, see if you can, can get excited about it?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So I have a very unusual career arc in some ways, which is like, I really almost changed jobs like every six months for a long time. Like, you know, I was working on this integrity stuff with News Feed in the background. Then I was working on News Feed for about a year. Then I worked on site speed and infrastructure and like detecting salves and issues. And then I worked on bootcamp and then I worked on messaging and groups. It's like, I just, you know, I had this really funny thing. I always kind of joke, it was like, uh, for those who are old enough to remember Karate Kid, I felt like I was, you know, painting a lot of fences, waxing a lot of cars, and at the end I knew karate. It was like, at the end, at the end I had the payoff. Is I'd gone through, I'd met a lot of people and I'd worked in these different areas and I understood different dynamics.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Well, other people who joined in my cohort were getting promoted, but they were like in a single track. Like they just stayed in one place and they got promoted. Whereas I kept moving around and it probably at some point early in my career, felt like I was moving more slowly relative to my peers. And then when I finally turned the corner, really with the ads appointment, which I did for five years, I went vertical. I just like, my career went vertical and I was, I've kind of, since then I've kind of been on that trajectory. And so advice I most often give people that this, very immediately is the lesson that I take from this is just like, I just was willing to learn. Aggressively, I would move because I wasn't learning enough. I was bored. And so I wasn't like learning enough new stuff. And what was cool about finally getting into the ads job and likewise in the job I'm in now is like those jobs I learned a ton for five years.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I'd never stopped learning in those jobs. You will occasionally find those jobs where they're super deep and you can just keep learning. Meanwhile, a lot of my friends whose careers were on a better trajectory than earlier, they literally got bored of what they were doing. But they didn't like have any place to jump to. Like there wasn't like some other, they were, they'd become domain specialists in a domain that they'd kind of exhausted for themselves. And maybe they even stuck around longer than they wanted to because it was comfortable or because the company wanted them to. And it ended up kind of being a hindrance to them in the middle of their career. And so for me, it's like, uh, don't be jumping into things, give it six months. If it's not the thing, no problem. Like you just built a ton of new skills. That's going to come in handy. I promise you that. Keep going.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  And, and likewise, uh, when you do make that jump, that's a early career. Optimize for learning, optimize for like, think about a compound interest, like it's, it's like the first like 10 years of compound interest don't look that impressive. It's like after 10 years, it starts to look good.

• 41:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that advice. It's, it's similar advice. I always give of variety of experience often ends up being the most valuable thing you build over time. Just trying to dump a bunch of stuff, doing some internal tools, maybe working on customer support. I don't know. And trust and safety, user facing products, infrastructure. I'm thinking from a PM's perspective, maybe an engineer's and other functions. One question along those lines. So we talked about the I have Sauron and working on like the most important thing at the company. Do you have any advice on how much of your career should be working in that center?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, all that's being equal, I think there's two really good places to be. I think one is carrying a lot of water in areas that the company is not paying attention to, but you know are important. And it needs to be a lot, like you really gotta, you gotta own that stuff and like really move mountains over there. Because like I promise you as an executive, when there's a huge.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Dam, holding up, you know, the floodwaters. You respect the heck out of the person who is holding that dam up. Like you're like, you know, you keep doing that atlas. Like that is good work over there. The second place to be, or maybe this equally big is like on the most important thing. And on the most important thing, that's where you get like to the advice that Eric Schmidt gave Charles Sandberg, which is like, hey, it's a rocket ship. Get on like, don't ask what seat I'm in, like just get on. If it's the most important thing, you're going to get a smaller piece. Everyone wants to be there. Get the piece. If you, if it's the most important thing, get the piece that you can crush, kill, do a great job at and grow from, because you're going to get a ton of visibility, you're going to get a ton of experience, you're going to see what it looks like in the fire, like in the fire, and that is invaluable.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  You will use that everywhere. And that, so I say that, that's at project selection time. But now I'll be cautious, understand? Projects that start in the fire, hopefully are forged in some manner of metal that cools and is no, no longer in the fire, like God willing. And likewise, things like dams that are holding up floodwaters have a tendency to crack or break or floods overcome. It's like, so I think you, you do want to be at selection time in one of those two places. But then you also get, you're going to stick with the ride. And again, to my point, like if you're not engaged, if you aren't doing great work, if you don't love it, then move on. If you've exhausted it, you used to love it, but you don't anymore, move on. If you still love it and you're engaged, great, that's cool.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Like it's, we, that's a great thing. You, you deserve to go from the forge to the dam and back over time. Like that, you don't have to always just keep jumping onto the latest fire. I tried to do that once after the ad business, actually, so I spent six months and we built the first mobile ad product in 2012 and kind of saved the IPO, which had gotten pretty grim, you know, at that point. And I told Mark, I was like, this is so fun. Maybe you can just keep doing this. He was just putting me on the biggest fire every six months. And he turns to me and said, Buzz, that's not a real job. He's like, I need you to stay here and usher this forward, which I did for the next four and a half years. And it was amazing. It was amazing. And again, I do give him such, I, it's funny, I'm going to get a hard time in this. I'm one of the, one of Mark's biggest critics, as well as being one of his biggest fans.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  I'm both those, I have both those jobs. But today we're talking about stuff that I think Mark really demonstrates really well. And he, he did a great job of, of pushing me in my career to different places where I didn't think I could succeed. And he saw the opportunity and made it happen.

• 45:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  What have you learned about giving Mark like negative criticism, anything that he accepts? What have you learned about that?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Mark's voracious for all information and all points of view. One of the things that's pretty interesting, I talked to you earlier about how much as a founder, I think especially, you have to have tremendous conviction. You just have to, you have to have a tremendous degree of confidence. And I think Mark is somebody who is like, maybe the strongest willpower of a person I've ever met, just in a pure willpower sense. And so one of the things that's interesting about Mark is you'll give him feedback. He listens, he's a very, he's a kind person to work for. So you'll give him feedback and he'll listen, truly. He'll most often tell you that you're wrong, why you're wrong. It's just like most often. And what will happen is it's uncanny. It's like over the course of the next like week or two, you'll just see shifts. And I don't think he's like doing it.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  So, you know, I've always kind of joked like the information gets to him. So much information every day gets to him. And then like at night, he like recompiles the whole world with all that information and comes back. And by the way, this is not just true about product work. In my head, I was thinking about product stuff where you're just like, hey, I think this product is doing this wrong. He's like, no, no, that's why it's not that way. And the product will such as to also have to give him feedback just on his own presence in a meeting or delivery. He'll be like, oh, well, here's why I did it that way. And then like a couple of weeks later, you'll be in a similar situation and he will moderate, like how he shows up. So I actually find him somebody who's really, it's really satisfying to give him feedback. It really works. It's very effective, but you do have to like take the long view on it. Like, and he will have a, he will, the things he did, he didn't do on accident. He will have a reason why he did it in the way he did.

• 46:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's a great example of strong opinions loosely held.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 46:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  It also makes me think, I think use the compiler analogy. I'm thinking like the model training, like the re, he's retraining his model overnight.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. One of the things, one of the things that's so funny about Mark is he, if you give him some feedback in the morning. The next like six meetings he has, whether it's about that product or not, he will ask people what they think of that feedback. He won't attribute, he's just like, hey, what do you think about this in this product? And so you'll be in a meeting with him and you'll see him doing it. He'll come to the meeting with you about some other topic. You're like, hey, boss, what do you think about this product and this, this idea? And so he will like, over the course of the day, take that little note and kind of pressure test it because he, and he loves to triangulate. What is, where are all the points of view on this that maybe you didn't see? Uh, so he really values a broad perspective on each thing that's being discussed. Just really fun.

• 47:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Trying to get more training data for his, for his model. I get it.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  I'm not here, you can't get me to call Mark in LLM. That's not fair. That's easy.

• 47:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  We could all hope to be as, as smart as Mark. As you were talking, I noticed your tattoos and it reminded me that you've got at least two tattoos that I'm aware of.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  One is of California, which I completely understand. California is a very special place. But you have this other tattoo that is just the words Veritas. Can you talk about what that's about and why that's important to you?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  The funny thing with tattoos in general is I came out of high school as like, I don't know, I don't know what my, I don't know if there was an archetype for me, but I didn't drink till I was 21. I was a very rule following person. I was like, why are you going to get a tattoo? You know, it's like affect your body. Like people die, why you dye your hair? Like, just like let it be what it was. And some of this was like, I think I was a, somebody who was privileged and had a great deal of self-confidence in who I was and what I wanted to be. And that was fine. But some of it was also like weirdly judgy about other people in a way that's kind of off brand for me, certainly today, but even at the time. Getting a tattoo was a big deal for me because I was like, oh, like this is just like the vehicle for my life. And like, you can do whatever you want with it and it doesn't have, it's not like a,

• 48:41Speaker 01

  you know, it's, it's something that you possess and you can, if you, if you feel like, if you want to decorate it, you can decorate it. And so getting a tattoo was a big deal to me, actually. And I kind of completely shifted my mindset of, of how I thought about my body and how I thought about. People's body in their presence and the time, maybe to some degree, even like an understanding of mortality, like, hey, this is like, can't take it with you. Like, it's all, it's all gonna go, you know, when you're 18, you think you're gonna live forever. And when you're, by the time you're 22, a grizzled 22-year-old veteran, you're like, ah, tattoo that bad boy up, it's all going down. And so, yeah, that's why I got the Veritas tattoo, which is Latin for truth, which is, you know, I will say, it's a little cheesy, because it's also Harvard's motto. And, but I got it in a monotype font, as you know, as the

• 49:26Speaker 01

  programmers font here. The other thing is interesting to me about tattoos was, it's also part of a generational shift. You know, we grew up in a time when tattoos were really seen by adults as, you know, gangs, or bikers, or sailors, or like, you know, certain types. Now, my understanding, I saw a stat recently, that more people in my generation have tattoos than don't have tattoos. And so I think, I think we also just culturally shifted positions in a way that I find, I find richness of self-expression wonderful. I really think it's great. And so I'm, I'm here for all of it.

• 49:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  My assumption from what you're describing is this idea of truth is very important to the way you think and work.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  My reputation does precede me on this point, I'm afraid. It's just, you know, I think when I was young, I saw being honest, and I was wrong, by the way, I saw being honest as like, kind of a get out of jail free card. You could say whatever you wanted, as long as you're being honest. That's just not the case at all. If, and I've, I've read about this before, but by far, my biggest professional regrets were me not being kind. And I used to think, like, I wrote this note a while back called Be Kind, where being nice, that's like patronizing, or, or telling somebody things that are half-truths, or just like getting by. And I'm against that. But being kind isn't that. Being kind is like, hey, how can I deliver this feedback in a way that is actually productive and helpful, in

• 50:46Speaker 01

  a way that is gonna help them, and not cause them just to feel bad and helpless. And I think, I was, I did that wrong a lot, as a kid, as a young man. And so being honest is still a big part of my personality. No one would ever accuse me of being dishonest, who knows me. And I think people understand and respect that I'm pretty direct. And if I have concerns or issues, I'm gonna bring them up. I'm just much better at bringing them up now, and expressing a true care and belief.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't think we could do better, if I didn't think we could fix it. I didn't believe in in the situation. And so being honest is still a huge part of my identity. And I think that's something I'm very proud of. But I will say the contextualization of like how I'm honest has changed immensely since I got this tattoo.

• 51:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  That seems reasonable. This touches a little bit on something I definitely wanted to talk about, which is one of your most classic pieces. And this is the way I first learned about you is a piece that is called Communication is the Job.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  I know many people have read this, many people haven't. I'd love for you to just talk about what this means and why this is important, why this is something that you wanted to share.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a it's one of the things that especially if you aspire to be a leader and and leadership isn't management. And leadership isn't being the only person responsible. It's not always the same as accountability. But if you want to have an impact on the world around you, it is exclusively done through the the the creation of artifacts or or verbalizations that like affect other humans. Like that's the only that is all there is. That's all there is if you want to have an impact. If you want to like create some kind of a lasting change. And it could be in your low in your little relationship. It could be in your team. It could be in your company. It could be in the world.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  It is down to communication. And so often you hear people saying like, oh, like, yeah, that was like, I had that. I wrote that up a year ago. It's like, yeah, but you did a bad job of writing a year ago, or we would have not wasted a year not doing it. Like, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, people always think that's, oh, I had that idea. And that's like, means anything. It means nothing. It means absolutely nothing. Or it's like, oh, like, I wrote this post like, well, you didn't break through with it. So that's like, that's on you. It's not on the audience. People want to blame the audience. Well, the audience is just there. And so I mentioned this even earlier, and I hope people caught it. When I when I said, hey, if Somebody's, I give somebody a piece of work and they come back six months later and they have done the wrong thing. Now I'll take the L. I will take the L on that. It's

• 53:16Speaker 01

  not great for them. They'll be pissed they wasted their time. But like I said, that's my responsibility. I did not communicate clearly what I wanted, what the expectations were. Could they have also helped themselves? Sure, they could have. And that's a thing that they, you know, takes all sides. We should, we should work on this problem from both angles. I have another post called Listening is the Job, which is the other side of this. But like, communication is a job, as I really believe, it actually has a relationship to this idea that came out of the US Marines and SEALs of extreme ownership, which is like, so whenever something goes wrong, it's like, I ask myself, what could I have done differently in terms of how I communicated things for this to have gone better? Could I have set priorities better? Could I have set expectations better? Did I need to have

• 54:00Speaker 01

  a better metric that I pointed the team at? Did I put the wrong people on it? By the way, the thing I talked about is org, org charts are communication devices. They don't exist. There's not a physical string between you and your manager. They're just communication tools that are supposed to give people a rough sense of how things are organized and where to go with who. And so all of these things are communication. Silence is communication. Me not reaching out to you to check on you, to check on your project, right? We talked about this, the IFRS earlier. What does that mean? That means trust. That means responsibility. Like, the absence of check-ins has meaning. You cannot not communicate. You are always communicating something with your face, with your clothes, with your body. What are

• 54:44Speaker 01

  you communicating? I'll give you a funny example, which I hope we get to put in the podcast, because if you're watching this on video, you will have noticed that my camera cannot stop adjusting light. It's just constantly too dark or too bright. I'm trying a new camera. I'm a nerdy guy. I try a lot of camera gear. I try a lot of microphone gear. I'm like, I love to have all the latest gadgets and gizmos. I'm trying something new. It's not working. And in my head, I'm like, what is this communicating about me? People are gonna think that I don't care or that I'm not competent. So, it's a little, little, that's what I'm talking about. And now I felt compelled to explain it in the podcast so I can communicate clearly that that's not the case. So I really just think so much of what I try to do in my professional life is understand the mental model of other people.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Where are they right now? And I mean, specific people like my managers or my key technical leaders. And I mean, general people like teams. And I mean broadly, like just the average human. Where are they at in this conversation? And how can I craft my language, my presence, my persona, everything to usher them from where they are to where I want to to get them. And that requires me to have a very clear idea of where I want to get them. Have to have a clarity of where they are. And I want to tell you, it's not as much work as it sounds like. This isn't like, I think no one would accuse me of having this big fabricated persona. Not that, but it is like having tremendous empathy for where people are starting. And I think, and that, that was the lead for me.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  All the rest of it, all the rest of how I show up at meetings and trying to smile more because I'm like a big scary guy, like those things are little things that you work on. Those are, and they become second nature and they're easy. The hard thing is just having the empathy for your audience and being like, where are they? Where are they starting? And when you miss taking responsibility for that, extreme responsibility for that.

• 56:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's so much good advice in that. There's so many threads I want to follow, but let's just follow this last one of trying to understand how someone is best communicated to. Is there an example to make that a little more real for people of just what you've done to like, oh, here's I'm going to communicate with this person?

• 56:45Speaker 01

  I'll give you a couple. So one is like multimodality. There's an old saying, right? Repetition never spoiled the prayer. And I think most experienced communicators, whether they be writers, whether they be public speakers, talk about the importance of reiterating a point several times and in several different ways to make sure that people have a chance to internalize it. You want to use it, you want to say it directly? You want to use metaphor? And so for me, it's like, I will give an all hands and then write a post with the content of the all hands because different people are going to respond differently to these modalities and are going to absorb information at different rates on these different modalities. That's a trivial one. Another one that I think of all the time is making sure that you address people's fears and concerns.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  People will not listen to you if they think you don't know what's going on. And so one of my favorite things to do when we're talking about some kind of issue is right up top and say, hey, let me be clear. This is the issue we're having. I know we're having it. I know it matters.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  And then I'll say the same thing that I would have said, but they would have literally ignored me because they're like, how can they trust my conclusions if they don't accept the premise? You know what I'm saying? So I think there's a, there's a whole piece there. Obviously, when you're in person, it's a lot easier because you're reading facial expressions, even on this, right? I'm reading you nodding on that. I'm like, okay, he's, he's got it. He's, he's with me. And then I throw in a, you know what I mean? Whereas if you were kind of like, give me a cocked head, I then bring a second example to try to like, drive the point home. But you build yourself up. Most people are going to realistically start in their careers trying to influence one or two people. That's where you start. One or two people. That's who you got to communicate with. Your manager, one teammate, that's who

• 58:30Speaker 01

  you got. And then you build up and build up and build up a skillset to do it at larger and larger scale.

• 58:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love so much of this advice. I think it's also helpful for relationships. Here's what you're upset about.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 58:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  Here's what I think we can do.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Being a, the work that I've had so graciously supported to do on myself at Meta with great mentors, Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, a bunch of others and coaches, absolutely made me a better partner and husband to my wife. And then, by the way, vice versa, having kids and getting deep in the literature around raising children, congratulations to you, by the way, getting deep in that literature made me a better manager, absolutely made me a better manager in terms of thinking about how people are managing their emotions and how to engage with them in those times.

• 59:16Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. We need a second edition of this boss's parenting advice.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 59:20Lenny Rachitsky?

  And relationships.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  It's like, it's all the good stuff. It's, you know, no bad kids, Lansbury, it's, it's good inside, Dr. Becky. Like it's all, it's all, I really, I really think that the modern parenting canon is really rich.

• 59:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. So much good content. This episode is brought to you by Xplo, a game changer for customer facing analytics and data reporting. Are your users craving more dashboards, reports, and analytics within your product? Are you tired of trying to build it yourself? As a product leader, you probably have these requests in your roadmap, but the struggle to prioritize them is real. Building analytics from scratch. Can be time consuming, expensive and a really challenging process. Enter Xplo. Xplo is a fully white labeled embedded analytics solution designed entirely with your user in mind. Getting started is easy. Xplo connects to any relational database or warehouse and with its low code functionality, you can build and style dashboards in minutes.

• 1:00:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Once you're ready, simply embed the dashboard or report into your application with a tiny code snippet. The best part, your end users can use Xplo's AI features for their own report and dashboard generation, eliminating customer data requests for your support team. Build and embed a fully white labeled analytics experience in days. Try it for free at Xplo.co/Lenny. That's E X P L O dot C O slash Lenny. Okay, you mentioned this gadget and these cameras you like to play with. Let's talk about the Vision Pro and VR headsets. Have you tried the Vision Pro? Thoughts?

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Actually, Mark and I tried it together and uh, I want to say, first of all, when the headset came out, we breathed a little sigh of relief because the stuff inside of it didn't represent a fundamental breakthrough. So there wasn't, uh, everything inside of it wasn't that we probably could have gone and done with the exception of Apple Silicon, which is a, you know, is a Marvel. But it's worth noting, Apple Silicon is like a 2X Marvel. When doing things like scaling display resolution is unfortunately a quadratic proposition. And so a 2X linear scaling advantage doesn't buy you as much as you might expect when you're trying to scale resolution. And so, uh, that was step one. And then, but we still assumed at that price point, you know, with their legendary attention to detail and polish, they probably, you know, produce a great product.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  And, uh, the line that I said, actually, you know, my own podcast with Matthew Ball a week ago was like, "Look, I was prepared to come to market and say, we have the best value headset." Like if you want a outstanding, best possible headset for the money, we've got it. It's the Quest 3. And I was so thrilled when I tried the AVP next to Mark. We were like, "No, no, no. We actually, we think we have the actual best headset." Now, we're not saying it's the best at all things. If you're sitting still and watching a movie in high resolution, uh, movie, yep, Apple Vision Pro is really great. Uh, it's really great that the resolution shines. Uh, the way they've tuned the pass through, uh, shines if you're stationary and looking straight ahead.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  And and they've done some really nice things with the UI.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  I'm a little bit, it's one of these things that we do get annoyed about. As a mile aside, we get a little bit annoyed about it as product people. And this happens to all of us, happens to Apple, happens to Google, happens to us. We have a bunch of internal things we've been playing with, which will at some point ship. And we will be accused of having stolen them when we actually, you did not steal them. Uh, if you, if you want, you can go see my Cora answer on the history of the like button. Where this happened previously, where we had built the like button internally before it was launched elsewhere. Uh, anyways, so the whole thing, so this, this happens in, in our industry a lot, and I really shouldn't care as much. It's a little bit of my ego peeking through, which I should control and tamp down by being responsible. But yeah, so, so, so the beautiful UI polishes, they did a tremendous job with, uh, eye tracking. One of the things that's interesting about the eye tracking is to do it the way they've done it.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  That's why you have to have the prescription inserts. So it doesn't support your, your glasses. You have to get prescription inserts. They're kind of expensive. And they can shoot the cameras that track your eyes through the lens as well as the, the light around it. Ours go from the side on, on the Quest Pro. And that allows you to wear corrective lenses. And so different choices like that have trade offs, but it's still cool. It's, it's great that they got that in there. At the same time, our hand tracking is better. Obviously, Hap Library, we knew was going to be better. That's not totally fair, uh, to them. They just, they've just launched and they have small volume still, but. But, uh, I just find the comfort, the thing that really got me the most, the field of view is really small on the Apple Vision Pro. And some people are characterizing it incorrectly on the internet. They're doing a characterization up close to the lens. Once you factor in the eye relief, the distance between where the lenses are and where your eyeball is.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Their field of view gets pretty narrow for almost all faces relative to ours, which I find distracting. Their view is their, their displays are much dimmer than ours. And I find the motion blur really distracting when I'm in mixed reality use cases. And as I mentioned earlier in the past, I'm a huge mixed reality buff. Like I'm a huge fan of that potential. For exactly the same reason that they are, by the way, which I think hands in mixed reality make it feel much more accessible to more people. I'm pretty glad we have the controller in our set, though, because it really expands what you can do. And, you know, we don't just like operate our computers with just like one thing. We have a keyboard, we have a mouse, so we do multiple modalities all the time. So I really feel like the comfort, the, the, the lack of persistence and motion blur in our pass through, the brightness of our displays.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, man, like if you had, if you gave me one to take, I would take Quest 3. Now, people have rightly said, it's pretty biased opinion. Of course it is, go get your own opinion. But what kills me is most people haven't done that. They have not tried the Quest 3. That's what kills me the most. If you go and try Quest 3, ask yourself if you'd rather have seven of those, one for you and six of your best friends, or one Apple Vision Pro. I'm sure the answer isn't Quest 3 for every person. There are people for whom there are use cases that really fit their life. The Apple Vision Pro, I'm cool with it. But people don't even know that the Quest 3, you can do Remote Desktop. You know, you can do it both through an app called Remote Desktop, which is very popular. Or you can go into workrooms, you can have three monitors surrounding you. Um, you know, streamed from your machine.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  It's like, so we, like, I think some of this is just like, people have not even done the work. They haven't even, they haven't even tried it. So I welcome all of you who think I am biased to prove one way or the other what you think. But don't do it without putting the Quest 3 on and giving it through its paces. It's a pretty great device and, uh, you can do a lot with 3,000 extra dollars. How did they get away with that, by the way? Three, we, we launched a headset that was like $12.99 and people lost their minds about it. And they're like, ah, $3,500, it's fine. This is fine. No, no one cares. I don't know. It says, you know, but fairness is too much to ask and I don't care about that. Apple has earned the great brand they've built. They truly have, I think it's tremendous and I, I certainly celebrate a large number of Apple products. I'm a huge fan of their work. I'm a huge fan of what they do.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  That's probably why I expected more from the AVP.

• 1:06:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  Well, I'll show you my favorite AR device, which is these Ray-Bans. I actually bought them. We, uh, here, I'll put them on and here, I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna record it and tell you I was gonna do this. I'm gonna record this as we're talking. Look at this.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  I like that. They look so, they look so good on you, too. This is a good fit.

• 1:06:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  My mother-in-law is like, you look so sophisticated. You look really smart with these on. Uh, and we bought these actually to watch, to film our kids, to like, or our kid, to like, instead of having Cameron's face. And it's been awesome.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  It's really the best. It is so hard to look at a phone screen and have the real thing be like. In between you like it's like no, it's the glasses, the way to do it.

• 1:06:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Look at this, my new look. She's got glasses on all the time.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Uh, we gotta get you the multimodal. I gotta, I've been playing with that since December, where you can use the camera to ask a meta AI assistant about things. It's really good. I was in a, I was in a ski village recently with my family. And I had him on, I just like, hey, you know, uh, take a look, tell me what you see. And it like, I had found a sign and it gave me directions like, hey, the bathrooms are down those stairs to the right. Like, if you want food, it's over to the right. I, it couldn't tell what village I was in, but it was like, you're in a ski village somewhere. Like, here's the amenities. And I was like, wow, you know, it's, uh, we're, there's some, there's some real magical here.

• 1:07:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  I feel like I need this for my podcasting interviews, so I could just have a little voice tell me like, questions to be asking and where I'm at.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna cheat on this one and, uh, and say, we got a, we have, obviously, we've been talking for a while about playing with glasses that have, uh, full AR capabilities. And we've got one that is rumored to be coming internally soon. So heavily rumored, in fact, uh, that you might even say it's, it's almost been confirmed. And, uh, what's been, what's been really fun is, is being able to play with these really, time machines, really, in terms of what they are. That is some amazing, amazing technology. And yeah, people were, uh, giving speeches, like big company-wide speeches, and had all their notes on the glasses. And they could control the, the slides, uh, just using a, a, a gesture. So, uh, there's, there's, there's, there's exciting things afoot. It's, uh, the feature's looking pretty bright.

• 1:08:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Something that I wanted to touch on, which is when Mark put out this whole video of here is what I think of, Apple Vision Pro versus the Quest, a lot of people are just like, oh, man, because he's putting out this video, he must be so afraid of what's happening. And it's like, it's not the right move. What went into the thinking? Was there like strategic thinking there? Was it just him like, here's what I think?

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  You know, this does murder me about the modern era. Everyone's in there meta head about everything. Everything's like a four-dimensional chess. That was just what Mark thought of the thing. That's what he thought about it. Uh, you know, I think he wanted to make sure people remembered, hey, Quest 3 is literally a better device. And it's, you haven't even, people have even tried it. And so, there, you know, we're not always playing four-dimensional chess over here. Sometimes we're just like, here's a thing that I believe is true. I'm going to say it out loud with my mouth. Like, that's what we did. It's like, huh, that's not that hard. It's like, and I think, I guess people, you know, when I do it, everyone expects it, even because of my persona or brand or everything is, and I guess people are surprised when a CEO does it. All right, I get that. That's cool. There's like other sets of societal expectations there.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  And like we're all familiar with like, you know, Apple putting the welcome IBM ad in The New York Times and then Slack doing the same thing with Microsoft and like the bomber iPhone comments. None of those were true discussions of the technical merits of a product. Right? Those were all just like big, you know, rally the troops like gestures. This is not that like we've like we're like Mark is deep. He's an expert in this stuff. I'm an expert in this stuff. Like I feel great about our choices. I, by the way, when I use it, I could get myself completely into the head of the person who designed it. And what I can tell you from using it, what instructions they were given, that team was given, I can tell you what they were optimizing for. I can tell you what constraints

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  they were under. By all the choices they made, I can tell you all those things. And I understand it coheres in that way. We made different choices. It shouldn't surprise anyone. We like our choices better. Like we could have made those choices. We didn't make those choices. We made these other choices. And so for me, like the weight, the wire, which just always brushes against my ear, like the the pocketable thing, like I get it. It's not what I would have done. And I know that because I had the chance to do it and I chose not to. So it's like, I don't know. I don't know why people are surprised. But, uh, but yeah, so I think, I think this wasn't like, this wasn't some big savvy strategic move. This was just like, Mark's like, got a chance to use it. He's like, oh, man, like, I think we should tell people what the real story is here. And we did.

• 1:10:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that insight. And I know a lot of people watching are like, oh, shit, he's right. Wow. I didn't think of it that way. And so I think it had a lot of that impact. I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about Meta's journey over the past couple of years. It feels like there is a huge downturn in public perception of Meta and the stock price. And then over the past couple of years, there's been a huge turnaround. And it feels like there's always a lot to learn from these periods. So just as an example of the stock price, I was just looking at it. It was down to $80 ish and now today it's $487.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Lenny Rachitsky?

  I'm curious just what you've learned from going through that downturn and turnaround. And I know it's still in progress, but just what, what have you learned from that journey?

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's a lot to take away. I got to tell you, I think we had the single largest, the largest single day stock drop in history, followed 18 months later by the largest single day gain in stock market history. Oh, my God. As the legendary Lou Holtz said, you know, you're never as good as they say you are when you're winning, and they're never as bad as they say you are when you're losing. Mark has always, always brought that quote out to guide us internally, to try to insulate ourselves a little bit from the vagaries of external opinion. And that's not just true with stock prices, that's true with media and press. It's true across a lot of things. One of the things I told my team, and I still have to repeat it to them, is like,

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  one of the things that's hard to remember when you're in it is that you know more than the critics do. You know more than the analysts in the marketplace do. You know more than the media does. You know more than the podcasters do. You know more than the Twitter does. You know more about what's real and substantial of value about our company than they do. That doesn't mean ignore them. Because they have a different perspective, and you need to understand it. And it may contain, even if the totality is less than what you know, it may contain parts that you do not know. So I'm a huge fan. I read the criticism of everything. And I read it very carefully, looking out for confirmation bias, looking out for things that

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  I might be inclined to resist, but are maybe true. I invite all critique, but I also don't accept the critique blindly. I don't just say, yes, this is obviously true.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  There's a great,

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  Gall Manning amnesia is a great concept for everyone to understand. Gall Manning amnesia is this property where if you, you'll read a newspaper article, let's say, newspaper, why not? About a thing about which you are an expert. So, and you'll be baffled because here is an article that is not just wrong. It's like it's inverted causality. It's a, what's it, Michael Crichton, I'll steal Michael Crichton's quote on this. It's a wet sidewalks make rain story. And you'll be like, what a terrible, bizarro story. And then you will turn the page of the newspaper and it'll be another article about a topic about which you know nothing. And you will read it as if it is the gospel truth. You'll tell your, it's, oh, no, look at this information about, you know, this foreign situation. It's perfectly true. We should be smarter than that.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  And so does that mean you don't read the thing? No, you read it. You just read everything with that perspective of like, wait a second, like this is another point of view. And how do I integrate that into a whole perspective that I can have and be informed about? So that's the first, the macro thing is, is taking the long view, realizing that when you're in the dumps, it's not as bad as you think. When you're at the top, it's not as bad, it's not as good as you think. It's like somewhere in between at all times. The second thing is communication is the job. We really did not communicate effectively, I think, with the market around our future investments. And listen, we've had two 10-year-long, huge investment areas.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  One has been AI, one has been Reality Labs. And AI is looking pretty good today. I think we can all agree, you know, with Lama 2, with FAIR, the breakthroughs that we've had, with the second, people don't know is that FAIR, our AI research lab is our, the second most cited research lab in AI behind Google. So we've been, we've been doing this work. We didn't come here casually, like we've been doing it. And so that's looking pretty good. I don't think we did enough to explain those bets to people. Previously, the core business was going strong enough and they kind of were willing to ignore them. And what's the old Warren Buffett quote? It's only when the tide goes out, we see who's not wearing swimming trunks. And so it's like, when the tide went out, when you have the Ukraine war and an interest

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  rate hike and recession spent, and recessions, now everyone's scrambling for that incremental dollar. And then I go get rid of this stuff. And we had to tell the company, you don't want to work at a company that when times are tough, kills all future growth and just like shores up in the core business. That's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point, a little later than expected, but like dying at some point. You want to work at a company that has a balanced portfolio of investments, which we had. We didn't explain that well. And so we spent that time explaining that to the market, to the press, to everybody. And now it's, you know, now it's, I think as people understand the size of it, the scope of it. And of course it helps that the core business is, is kind of overcome its challenges there from ATT and the other kinds of stuff. It's looking pretty good.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  So yeah, I think, uh, I do think one part is as an internal person, really moderating your attachment to the external narratives and swings. That's super important. And you do that based on like understanding your own expertise. And the second part is understanding why is there a delta? Like what is there? And, and it's usually communication.

• 1:16:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's also a big flattening of the org. This was something a lot of people talked about where managers became ICs. Is there anything more there that you've learned of just how to adjust the org to be more efficient?

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I should, and I should have included that in the first section. It was, I was a bit eager to wrap it up elegantly in the two, but you're right.

• 1:16:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  We did make, we made significant shifts in how we operated the business, which was super painful. And, uh, listen, this goes back, uh, I just, you know, this goes back to the boom times of COVID, when it looked like there was a, a real lasting secular shift in things like e-commerce and in working remotely and these tool sets, which are exactly what we build. And it's primed us until we built up a huge workforce to pursue those opportunities. We still believe in those opportunities, but they're a little, they're back on their original timeline. And actually, literally, if you look at a bunch of graphs that we have internally,

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  it literally, the COVID boom and then, uh, kind of as it, not bust really, as it receded, everything's back on its original trajectory. So we didn't like lose ground or lose time, but the pull forward didn't happen. Well, that means that your economics don't make any sense anymore. Now you've made a bunch of investments that are going to yield too distant in the future. And getting there faster isn't going to help you and you're carrying a much extra cost. That sucks, man. It sucks and we don't feel great about it. We really don't. And it's a business. It's awful and it happens. I do think one thing that was interesting at that time was for those of us who I grew up and saw the dot com boom firsthand. I was born and raised in the valley. So that was

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  like all around me when I was graduating high school, going to college. And then in the 2008 major recession on the housing crash and the market and all that stuff. Now let's imagine you graduated college in 2009 and got a job. Well, shoot, you're 15 years in your career. You could be a director and you've never seen a downturn. So I think we also had, in addition to, you know, what is very unfortunately conventional misforecasting in the business that caused us to over hire that we had to correct for. You also had a workforce that was just not at all of a mentality that this could ever happen. Like it's like this felt like it was a, you know, a act of God, when in fact, it's like

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  a cyclical nature of all businesses that this will happen at some time and you hope it doesn't and you wish it didn't, but you have to deal with it. And so I think we bit of a tough storm there for the whole industry and we're still feeling it. I think, you know, we're still feeling it. Certainly, we're happy at Meta to be beyond that point and we're growing again and executing at a stable rate and feeling really good about that. But quite a few of our other companies in the industry aren't. It's a very uncertain time for, for engineers, for PMs, for designers, for everyone and all the support functions around them. So I'm super sympathetic for that. I think what, obviously the misforecasting that happened inside of Meta's walls happened everywhere. And, and now that you have, especially with, with higher interest rates and cash isn't

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  as cheap, runways are tighter, like people are just making those pragmatic calls. I think we'll rally back from this. I think this is a normal thing that happens to industries, but it doesn't reduce my sympathy and empathy for those who have been affected by it or who live in fear of it.

• 1:19:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, I was talking to a friend who works at Meta and I was asking them what it's like to work at Meta. And she was just like, it's intense. And it used to be more chill. There were people that were coasting here and there. And now she's like, no, all those people are gone now. It's just only the intense people left and things are, we're working really hard. Does that bring up anything?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want to comment on people who left. People left Meta for all kinds of different reasons or, and likewise, you know, role elimination happened in many cases because we just decided not to do this work at this point. We're going to do it two years from now and don't need to carry a team to do it. So I think it's really hard to generalize because each of these is a specific person with a specific life and a story that is rich and deserves to be told. But I do think that, uh, yeah, if there was somebody coasting and you as a manager have to make tough calls on who you're bringing in, uh, like you know which way you're going to bias. My profound suspicion, and again, I don't know your friend who you spoke with, my profound suspicion is that person was probably already working hard. You know what I'm saying? Like, like that person was already probably working hard.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Like, I don't think we like changed how hard any individual worked. I really don't believe that. I do think there was a selection bias as to like, like what was going to happen. And I think that's probably what you saw playing. In fact, if there was, if there is a generality that can be found.

• 1:20:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Maybe as a last question, I have this segment where I call Failure Corner, where I ask people to share a failure of their career and what they learned from that experience. Is there, is there something that comes to mind?

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  I've failed tons of times. I've built products that nobody used. Uh, I've built, uh, technical architectures that didn't scale. I've failed at kinds of times. Uh, I don't regret most of those. Uh, almost every one of those, uh, I learned from, you know, it was a, a stop on the path to a better solution. Or it was a recognition that this thing wasn't going to work ever, which is, you know, its own kind of a gift. All the failures that I regret that I take seriously are personal failures where I affected a person in a way that I'm not proud of. Maybe you wasn't proud of the time because I wasn't in control of my own emotions or mood. I was feeling fearful. I was feeling scared.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  And there's a bunch of these, one or two that stand out that I don't feel comfortable sharing because the person affected, I think would be, would prefer I didn't share. I'll share one that was, uh, yeah, I think the person's an hour tight now. We had this really silly discussion. I remember it so vividly. In the early days of client server architectures, uh, which Facebook obviously is a website. So you're calling to a server to get the webpage, but then that server is going to call the other servers to gather things. And I was one of the major kind of

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  clients of remote procedure calls, uh, because News Feed ranking was all done on this other set of servers that had its own special requirements and special build and how it was put together. And so, you know, your main web server would put a call out over a remote procedure call to the remote server and, and get a response back. And, uh, we had, we created this really janky RPC system that, uh, I won't say who built it, but it was built. And it was such a piece of garbage, constantly failing, was not robust at all. And one of our best engineers, Mark Sleek, built a new one called Thrift. It was a great, really great RPC, uh, infrastructure. And, uh, one of my, one of my best friends, Dave Federer, one of my really good friends and a brilliant engineer.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  We were talking about how to do the encoding and I was like, I want it to be binary encoding. I was like, if you binary encoding, I want it to be super efficient on the wire because I'm storing these RPCs. They do two jobs for us, one of which is that the active RPC. But I also stored the RPCs in a log and replayed them to do the work that we were doing in News Feed ranking. That's how it was done back in the day. It was all kind of asynchronous offline. And so I wanted to be as tight as possible because my memory bandwidth is very limited and memory was so expensive back then. And Dave Federer was like, no, no, like that's, you know, that's short-term thinking, Baz. Like we should be using Linux style descriptors that are plain English language. Then you could look at the log, you can see what it is. It's parseable.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Like memory bandwidth will get cheaper, but like these logs being scrutable to development is going to be a better thing. This is a totally, this is nerd bait. Those who have been engineers in this call, this is like Vim Emacs, this is nerd bait. This goes deep.

• 1:23:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love it. Keep it coming.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  I, I think I like, it's a room full of engineers at the company, and the company's not that big. And so probably half engineers at the company in this room. And I just like absolutely, I was like yelling at Dave. I'm like, I'm literally like, I'm turning red. I'm like sweating. I'm so angry at Dave Fetterman for like, for countermanding my proposal when I'm the major RPC customer. A couple of things. This is so, and it's so dumb. Marcely just built two encoders. It's not that hard. You just build, you pick which encoder you want for your things. That's the easiest solution ever. Uh, second thing is Dave was right, by the way, like, but within a year, the memory map definitely didn't matter relative to like how inscrutable it was to like try to get into these logs. I had to build a ton of actually custom software to like log, parse the logs and like understand what's going on.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Uh, but also it was just like, it was just a, it was a case where my identity was caught up in being right. Like my identity, and for those who don't know, identity threat is just the biggest, the most your worst behavior is always going to come out when you think you are under identity threat. When you feel like some core part of how you see yourself is in question, you will react with every ounce of your fiber to defend that conception of yourself because it's so expensive to reconceptualize who you are that you like defend yourself. So like my identity was being right. I got a very toss on the wrist. And it caused me to take like one of my best friends, one of the best engineers I knew, a guy I literally lived with, and getting like a really embarrassing for me conflict, whichever was just like scratching their head like, what is going on with Boz right now?

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Like, I look like an unhinged crazy person. Yeah, I remember so, I remember the room. I remember where I was standing in the room. I remember everything about that moment. And I had to go home and be like, what the fuck was that? Like, what, what happened? I'm asking myself, like, what happened there? And, uh, that was kind of one of the many steps on the journey to recontextualizing what it was, uh, was not to be right. And to be, well, to be open minded and curious and how to engage in conversations. I was 22, I don't make excuses for it now, but I remember, there was, there was a couple of other examples like that in things that were less technical and more personal that I won't share, but I remember each of them vividly. And I, you know, those, those are the real failures for me.

• 1:26:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love how this story is like so long ago at this point and it's still stuck with you and such an impact.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Yeah, I'll never forget that. It was, it was embarrassing. And for those, it's the old quote, it's really one of the truest quotes, and I know it's cliche and sometimes cliches are cliches because they're good. It's like people, they don't remember what you said, they just remember how you made them feel. That's all, that's all, that's all anyone remembers is how you made them feel. And I think in that room, I made people feel like unsafe, maybe like it was bad, you know?

• 1:26:27Lenny Rachitsky?

  I like this concept of identity threat. They call this podcast episode, identity threat.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:26:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  Boz, we started this episode with a billion questions. I have like a billion and one questions now. I wish we could keep going, but I know we have to wrap this up. Is there anything you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  Well, in the off chance that we do end up labeling this episode, identity threat, let me give you what really was. I, I made a lot of breakthroughs with coaching, learning about the feeling inside of my own body when I was feeling that identity threat and learning techniques and tactics to reduce the likelihood that I would feel it and how to deal with it when it happened and how to repair when I did. Like I went through all of that stuff. I would say the greatest lesson I learned would come years later and it was just from observing somebody. Ami Vora, who was a legendary, long time, came in and worked on our developer platform, then worked with me on ads for a long time. And then was the PM lead for WhatsApp for a long time. She's since gone on to do even more great things outside the company.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Working with her, it was like working with, like watching like an alien because she, her and I were so different in our approach. And she approached, she could have the most profound disagreement with somebody in the, in the world. And they would say the thing that she thought was not just like wrong, but like crazy wrong. And she would respond, she would say, fascinating, you have to tell me more about why you think that. And I can't do it justice. She meant it like from the core of her being. She was like intensely curious. She saw this schism between her and that person. And it could have been personal, it could have been professional, it could have been anything. She saw the schism and how they saw the world and how she saw the world. And rather than reacting. As if it was a threat that somebody saw it differently.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Or rather than reacting afraid that maybe she was wrong and had done things wrong before. She reacted with the most genuine and profound curiosity. And I just watched it absolutely tear down walls between points of view. People felt immediately her genuine heartfelt curiosity and would lean in. And that would cause them to be open minded. And if she was right, which by the way, she usually was, then they would leave being like, oh, okay. I was wrong about that. But she also would change her mind. And that was the key. I really, ever since then, I just, I really have tried to model that. It's just reacting when I have a strong internal clinch.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  I try to embrace curiosity like, wow, we do not see this thing the same way. Like, that is fascinating. Tell me why you see that. And that can be by personal feedback. Someone's, you know, someone's like, hey, Boz, I don't think you talk enough. Wow. You don't think I talk enough? That is unexpected. Like, I would love to hear more about that because no one's ever said that to me. So I wanted to give that to anybody who, to who might recognize this behavior in themselves. There's lots of things that you can do and you should do that work. The work of improving yourself is always fruitful and satisfying. And it pays off, as we discussed, in every aspect of your life, with your family, with your friends, and professionally. This is one that I really thought was so great, was just curiosity. Embracing curiosity in those moments of challenge has really completely changed my life.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  And I owe that to Amiwa.

• 1:29:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow, I love this example. It's basically an example of yes and, but in a really, like, no one's gonna be like, yes and. It's like a really nice way of saying it, just fascinating. Tell me more.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Fascinating, you've got to tell me why, how, like, I want to understand it.

• 1:29:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love that. Maybe that'll be the new title, fascinating.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:29:57Lenny Rachitsky?

  Anyway, with that, Boz, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  I'm ready.

• 1:30:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  The Dream Machine, which is a tremendous history of, prehistory really of modern computing, ostensibly following the life of JCR Lichtleiter, but really much broader than that, is a tremendous, missing piece of history in my opinion. I think in my discipline in computer science, we were not properly educated. We learned about Alan Turing and we learned about some of the technical underpinnings of computer science theory, but the modern computer and the path to it is a profound and fascinating one and it has particular resonance today as JCR Lichtleiter's observation was human in the loop computing. And I think we are now in human in the loop AI. And I think there's a tremendous resonance there. The second one is Good Inside, which is Dr. Becky's book. And again, I think it's a tremendous parenting

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  book, but more than that, it does contain lessons for how we think about our own emotions and how we manage those, which I find to be useful in any context.

• 1:31:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing recommendations. She's also got an online community for people that like.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  She's a wonderful online community. She's very engaged in it. And again, for those parents out there, you're a little early for this, Lenny, but you'll get there. Having little scripts that I'm reading like on Instagram that like, when I'm in a moment of tremendous emotional challenge with my children, I have the words handy. They're just like top of mind for me. They've been cashed in, right? They're primed, is a big game changer.

• 1:31:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  This will be for our parenting episode down the road.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:31:28Lenny Rachitsky?

  Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is super conventional, but Mandalorian. So one of the things that's been fun about that is related to my kids again, is we watched it with my kids. So we had a chance to go on the Galactic Star Cruiser. Again, y'all know I am a genuine and true nerd through and through. Huge fan of Scott Trobridge and his work at Star Wars, in Star Wars Lands in Disney and also of that. And so before that, we got our kids who were nine and six and watched all the movies together. And then we were watching Mandalorian together as a family. And it's a, it's super fun. And it's fun to have that kind of lore connection. So it's not just the classic kid movies, but there's something more. And I think for them, they feel like it's an adult kind of conversation they get to be a part of. So I've really enjoyed that. And I think the world of Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau and the team that's building that, that universe up.

• 1:32:17Lenny Rachitsky?

  This is the way.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  This is the way.

• 1:32:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing?

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  One of the most important things that I always ask people is what people who've worked with them would say are their greatest strengths and weaknesses?

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  I like this for a couple of reasons, not least of which is I often do follow up with references and I like to triangulate their awareness of how other people calibrate them. And also like how they respond to criticism. Are they saying, hey, like, uh, sometimes candidates surprise me. They say, hey, you'll hear this critique a lot from me. I don't think it's fair. That can be an okay answer, but they've got to be a pretty robust there. Or it's like, hey, this is something I'm working on. Here's what I'm working on. But I also like to hear where they think the superpowers are. And too often, a lot of attention in, in, uh, interviews is paid to weaknesses, which I care about because I want to know what the downside is. But way more important to me is like, what are you awesome at? Like, what is the thing that if I just like, I can just hitch a wagon and ride?

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Like, that's what I want to know. Like, where's like, where's the superpower that you're like crushing it at? And what's funny is people are pretty rarely give out reference checks. They're not that often accurate about what the critiques are, but they are usually pretty accurate about what their strengths are.

• 1:33:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  Interesting. I'm also a huge proponent of strengths and not worrying too much about your weaknesses.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  But asking people to contextualize their performance through the team, that's so important. We do not achieve very much on our own.

• 1:33:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Communication is the job.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. Is there a favorite product that you recently discovered that you love? And meta products are acceptable answers.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  The Ray-Ban Meta Glasses would be a tempting answer. Uh, the, the, the multimodal stuff, which I'm going to get in trouble because I've been teasing this for months on social media and it's still closed beta and it's like, we're growing the beta slowly. It's like, people are really badly want it. It was probably one of the most magical things I've like gotten to try recently. It's not totally fair because it's also not, you can buy the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses and very soon, I won't say when, but very soon they'll have this capability. But it's, it's more fun to think outside of the box. All right. This is such a, such a, uh, I'm going to get in trouble for this answer because it's a bit of a pretentious one. I am not a car guy. Let me say that right now. I don't like cars. I don't care about cars. Like, I want a car that works and doesn't like break. Uh, I grew up, all my cars growing up, I had over a hundred thousand miles in them

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  because we only ever had used cars. They were constantly breaking down and like, I would like, the power steering would go out while you're driving and you have to like, hug the thing or the brakes would go out or you'd throw a rod. I've done it all. So I just wanted a car. And so then I drove a Honda Accord that I bought, uh, for 10 years. And then I drove a Tesla Model S for 10 years and a Tesla Model S, uh, Had a thing happen to it while it was parked. I will get into that. So I get a new car. And again, I'm like, I want to get electric car. And I was like, I'm gonna get something nice. I'm gonna get something nice. I'm driving a Mercedes Benz AMG EQS. And I didn't know cars could be this nice.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  I grew up driving used cars and like, you know, whatever. I did not know it was possible. It is the best augmented reality product I think you could buy in the market today. You know, when they had the display, it puts your turn in three dimensional space. It's got cameras facing your eyes. So it's positioned correctly on this, on this display relative to your eyes. The turn. And so when you've come up, like, it's like you're hitting a little wall. You gotta turn before you hit the wall. And I was like, oh, my God, like, I think, I think this car is great augmented reality. So yeah, not a car guy, and I'm not trying to flex on this car, whatever it is. I like it a lot. And I didn't know they could be that nice. But the thing that I thought was so impressive was they did an amazing job with augmented reality in this car.

• 1:35:58Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow. Mercedes Benz, a player in the augmented reality, mixed reality.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, big time. They're out there. They're out there. They're in the lead.

• 1:36:04Lenny Rachitsky?

  I sometimes think about having a contest where I give away products people mention in a segment. And now you've blown my budget way.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Ray Banetta's, Ray Banetta's, you could, you could afford that.

• 1:36:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's amazing. I'm gonna have to check that out. I think we're gonna increase some sales for Mercedes. Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, think about, share with friends and family, find useful?

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a funny, actually, how we came about this. The motto my family has, my immediate family, like me, my wife and kids, is just trust yourself. Just trust yourself. Actually, the reason we have that motto is when we have a house, we have a few nice art pieces. And one of them is a Tracy Amon, a famous UK based artist, and she does neon pieces. And it says, trust yourself. And so it's in our bedroom hallway where me and all the kids and my wife are, it says, trust yourself. And every morning, the neon lights up and it's trust yourself. And then I had like a, I had the chance to have like a crest made in the UK. And my family's English from way back. And so we have in the, so in the, in the crest, it says, trust yourself. And I always talk to my kids, especially, I think, you know, I really think people, when you're experiencing peer pressure,

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  like, who do you trust? Like them or yourself? When you're having like a lot of self doubt and uncertainty, like you have to trust yourself. I just think so much of the.

• 1:37:21Speaker 01

  Success I've had, I think this is probably true of most people who went to startups and succeeded, was like, I just had faith that I was making good decisions. I mean, this comes back to the conviction point I made earlier about how you do things like news feed or controversial things, or how you make big expensive changes, right? Just conviction, like you have to, you have to believe that your eyes, ears and intellect have combined to give you a point of view that has intrinsic value and deserves your respect. As opposed to reading that newspaper article about your company and believing it over what your own eyes and ears have told you. So that's, that's the model that we go with.

• 1:37:55Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I think it's also important to say you won't always be right and that's okay.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Totally, that's right. You also, trusting yourself also includes taking risks because you trust that you can deal and handle with what happens when the risks don't pay out.

• 1:38:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Beautiful. Final question, I know that you're an amateur photographer, maybe semi-pro photographer, a lot of travel.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  Amateur, amateur.

• 1:38:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amateur, okay. You also have this website that I came across that I don't know if people know about it. It's this funny name, I'm not going to mention it, I don't know if you want people.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Warden Shortbow, it's, it's an anagram of my name, Warden Shortbow, anagram of Andrew Bosworth. Yeah, wardenshortbow.com. Uh, yeah, I, I love photography, I love it, it's a real passion of mine.

• 1:38:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  So here's the question, is there, what's your favorite photo that you've taken?

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Art is actually a great place to talk about trusting yourself, by the way. Uh, and I, I know it's cheesy to say it, but I think Rick Rubin's recent interviews on what art is and how people make it is spot on. You have to make it for yourself and you have to love it. And if someone else loves it and it finds broader resonance, that's awesome. Uh, but that's not like why you do it. And if you start to try to do it for broader resonance, then you're kind of chasing something else. It's a, it's a, it's media, it's entertainment, but it's not art, it's some other thing. And I say all this to basically tap dance and say, I kind of love a lot of my photos. Like, and it's very hard to pick a favorite. The one that is popping to my head, which has more emotional significance, is a picture I took of my son playing in the street and just jumping in a puddle,

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  uh, wearing, you know, a kind of a rain boot, rain slick kind of thing. And it's, it's not sharp, it's not in focus. It's like, it's a vignette, it's an idea. And, uh, I really do think Ansel Adams talked a lot about, uh, how the goal of the photographer is to create a capture that expresses to the viewer what it felt like. To be there and people forget that he was a master of the darkroom much more, even more so than maybe than the capture the print of the print was where he like did amazing work. And I've had the pleasure to go to his darkroom in, in Big Sur and, and spend time with his son and like, watch them do development in that room. And he had elaborate

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  scripts of how he would highlight, you know, dodge and burn different parts of the photograph to get it to have the resonance that he wanted. And, and he fought for photography to be accepted as an artistic medium, which it wasn't, which I find so resonant in today's AI art conversations, where once again, we're trying to gatekeep what is art and you just don't get to do that, unfortunately. So this picture of my son, no one would call it a technical marvel, but as a vignette of it capturing for me personally, but also I think in general for parents, the like, ephemerality of these tremendously touching, charming, human moments that you have with your children. That's, that's the one that comes to mind.

• 1:40:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. We're going to try to find it and link folks to it. And on the point of Rick Rubin, something he says along the same lines is that you think of art as like your diary, like I'm just describing what I find interesting and important. And nobody can come to me and say, my diary is wrong. It's my diary. This is how I see the world and that's okay. And that's where the best art comes from is just, and we'll link to this, there's an awesome video of him saying exactly this that I was recently watching, actually. Boz, this was so much fun. I am so thankful they made time for this. I'm looking forward to our parenting and relationships podcast in the future. Joking, not joking. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online? If they want to follow what you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm at Boz Tank on Instagram and on threads and also on X, facebook.com/Boz. And I also have my own podcast, which is Technical Deep Dive. So it's pretty different, I would say. It's a Technical Deep Dive. So try to go deep on one or two topics each time. That's called Boz to the Future. You can find that on Spotify or iTunes.

• 1:41:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  Boz to the Future. Buy some Quest stuff.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, boys, get yourself a Quest 3. Let's be honest, dude. Treat yourself.

• 1:41:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  There you go. Or these Ray-Ban sunglasses. I'm a big fan. Boz, again, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  Cheers. Thanks, buddy.

• 1:41:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:41:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.