#582: Mark Zuckerberg on Long-Term Strategy, Business and Parenting Principles, Personal Energy Management, Building the Metaverse, Seeking Awe, the Role of Religion, Solving Deep Technical Challenges (e.g., AR), and More

Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim delicious low-carb cereal, and Helium 10 https://helium10.com/tim all-in-one software suite to sell on Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg (FB http://www.facebook.com/zuck/IG http://www.instagram.com/zuck) is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta https://meta.com/, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse—moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. He is also the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative https://chanzuckerberg.com/ with his wife Priscilla, which is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges—including supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the 21st century. Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California in 2004. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout. * This episode is also brought to you by Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim cereal! Magic Spoon https://magicspoon.com/tim is a low-carb, high-protein, and zero sugar cereal that tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal. Each serving has 13–14g of protein, 4g of net carbs, and 0g of sugar. It’s also gluten free, grain free, soy free, and keto friendly. And it’s delicious! It comes in your favorite, traditional cereal flavors like Cocoa, Frosted, Peanut Butter, and Blueberry. Magic Spoon https://magicspoon.com/tim cereal has received a lot of attention since their launch. Time magazine included it in their list of Best Inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it “the future of cereal.” My listeners—that’s you—get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you visit MagicSpoon.com/Tim https://magicspoon.com/tim and use code TIM. And some great news for Canadian listeners: Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim now also ships to Canada! * This episode is also brought to you by Helium 10 https://helium10.com/tim! Helium 10 https://helium10.com/tim is an all-in-one software suite designed to help entrepreneurs launch, manage, and scale a profitable e-commerce business on Amazon and Walmart.com. Whether you are an entrepreneur who wants to start a business on your own terms or you want to scale your existing e-commerce operations, Helium 10 https://helium10.com/tim is here to help. They process more than 2 billion data points daily, have a robust 450+ million ASIN database, and provide at-a-glance analytics like seasonal trends for products, profit estimates, and more. Join more than 1 million Helium 10 users worldwide by signing up for a free account at Helium10.com/Tim http://helium10.com/tim! * How did teenage Mark get involved in the world of competitive fencing? [07:01] What does Mark find particularly compelling about classical studies and history? [10:00] Influential and recommended science fiction related to virtual realities. [13:32] How do Mark and his team get an organization of a hundred thousand people on board with long-term project plans that can extend into the next decade and a half? [17:26] What does Mark do to get comfortable with discomfort and manage his energy for whatever the day throws his way? [23:05] How long does Mark think it will take for us to realize VR technology as immersive as presented in Ready Player One? What kind of progress can we expect to see in the not-too-distant future? [27:02] The challenges of making VR a satisfying, nausea-free experience for everyone. [33:35] Projections for the societal effects of people earning sustainable livelihoods in the metaverse. [39:00] The new values being built into Meta’s cultural operating system — and the old values being adapted — to prepare for a more distributed, more honest, and faster future. [44:16] Challenges presented by moving from a Web2 to a Web3 world. [57:35] Mark’s assessment of Meta’s oversight board. [1:03:07] To what does Mark credit the longevity of his unique partnership with Sheryl Sandberg, and in what ways has it shifted his life and business over the past 15+ years? What does he consider to be Sheryl’s superpowers? [1:07:49] How did Mark’s family dynamics growing up shape who he is today and how he parents his own children? [1:12:52] What role, if any, does religion play in Mark’s life? [1:20:40] Did Mark go through an emo phase early in life? [1:24:53] Of the annual personal challenges Mark undertook for 10 years, which were the easiest — and the most difficult? [1:26:12] Does Mark foresee navigating the metaverse on multiple mobile devices running OSes not necessarily under Meta’s control, or will there be a more efficient, unifying device in the works? [1:30:49] Parting thoughts. [1:35:15] * For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys, you can get $250 off of the Pod Pro Cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eightsleep.com/tim or use code TIM. That's eight, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/tim, or use coupon code TIM, T-I-M. Eightsleep.com/tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a low carb, high protein and zero sugar cereal that I eat all the time. I ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. And it's so easy to prepare. It's instantaneous practically and you get a lot of goodness. You get a lot of bang for the buck. Time Magazine included Magic Spoon in their list of best inventions of 2019 and Forbes called it "the future of cereal." It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood. Remember those? But it's actually good for you. Each serving has 13 to 14 grams of protein, four grams of net carbs and zero grams of sugar. It's also gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free and keto-friendly. It's delicious and I don't say that lightly because most healthy versions of unhealthy

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  foods are not delicious, but these guys really nailed it. And I know they did a ton of testing because I know the founders. Magic Spoon comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors like cocoa, frosted and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at magic spoon.com/tim. I'm going to order some more cocoa today, in fact, because I need more. Cocoa is my personal favorite, but that might change soon because they're launching two limited edition flavors, oatmeal cookie and honey gram, both of which I'm excited to try. And another fun fact, my friends are also obsessed with Magic Spoon. One of this podcast's most popular guests, Dr. Peter Attia routinely crushes six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot, by the way, with practically no glycemic response. That's blood sugar response.

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  And he's checked this with a glucometer. He likes it so much that he invested and two other friends, very fine gentlemen, also past podcast guests, Kevin Rose and Ryan Holiday also invested. So check them out. Go to magic spoon.com/tim and grab a variety pack or my favorite cocoa or anything else. My friends love this stuff. Their kids love this cereal. So whatever strikes your fancy, but you should check it out. My listeners, that's you, get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you use code TIM at checkout. So if you don't love it, they'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. One more time, that's magic spoon.com/tim. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:23Tim Ferriss?

  No, it would seem inappropriate to me.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:39Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October of 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and to focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse, a term you've no doubt heard in the last few weeks and months, moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. He is also the co-founder and the co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with his wife,

• 5:24Tim Ferriss?

  Priscilla, which is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world's toughest challenges, including supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the 21st century. Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California, beautiful place, in 2004. You can find him on Facebook, facebook.com/zuck, and on Instagram, instagram.com/zuck, Z-U-C-K. And Meta, you can find, of course, at Meta, M-E-T-A, dot com. Just a few more comments before we dive in, and that is related to questions and subjects. I wanted to cover new ground with Mark. I did not want to rehash questions and topics that have been covered a lot in the media,

• 6:09Tim Ferriss?

  whether by The New York Times or anyone else for that matter. And one of those topics is Ukraine, because Meta has spoken and published publicly about their ongoing efforts regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So you can read about them also in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And Mark has commented on these things already. If you want to learn about what I am doing on that front, you can go to tim.blog/ukraine. But we had limited time in this conversation, and I wanted to cover subjects that would have some staying power, some relevance, moving forward six months, 12 months, maybe even several years, when people are listening to this podcast in the future.

• 6:49Tim Ferriss?

  So, thank you very much for listening, and I hope you enjoy this very wide-ranging conversation with none other than Mark Zuckerberg.

• 7:01Tim Ferriss?

  Mark, nice to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for making the time.

• 7:04Speaker 02

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

• 7:07Tim Ferriss?

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

• 7:50Tim Ferriss?

  could you just describe your background with fencing and how you ended up competing?

• 7:56Speaker 02

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

• 8:01Speaker 02

  I fenced competitively when I was in high school. It's not something I did since I was like a little kid or something like that, but I've always loved sports and, you know, just being active. I like problems that you can solve intellectually, but I I also just think managing your energy and kind of being out there and being physical, it's just always been a really important part of my life. And I was looking for a sport that would do this in the winter in high school. I did a bunch of running, right? So I did cross country and I did tennis as well. So I started doing fencing. And I didn't do it competitively for a super long period of time, but the thing that I loved about it is it's obviously very physical and cardio taxing, just being kind of on your

• 8:42Speaker 02

  feet and kind of bouncing around. But it's also very, very mental. And I have these memories when I was in my high school chemistry classes of writing out sequences of moves that I wanted to try when I was like doing bouts later after school that day and different things that you can do to win in multiple ways, basically try to catch people off guard in one position. It's like, okay, if they do power you, then you're still in a better position. You can get them on the left or something, or if they don't, then you get the touch. So I found it to be a very, very intellectual, but a good, a good sport. I was never that good at it. You know, I did it competitively, went to some, some state competitions and stuff like that, but I don't think I would have been good enough to do it at college, for example, but it's mostly, it's a fun thing to do.

• 9:27Tim Ferriss?

  So the closest experience that I have is with kendo. I lived in Japan for a period of time and I did some kendo. And I think it shares quite a bit in common with fencing. Of course, the techniques are quite different. The slashing movements predominate in kendo, although you are allowed to stab to the throat if you're past a certain age, which is all a separate matter. But the idea of, as they might say in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, this sort of position before submission is an interesting one, right? So even if your first attempt fails, you're in a superior position to execute on your next move. And it's always struck me that as much as people think of you as someone who studies, or even predicts, or looks at trend lines into the future, it seems like you have quite a background in

• 10:12Tim Ferriss?

  studying the past. And that's where I wanted to go next, which was classics. It seems like you've spent quite a bit of time studying classics. And I was wondering if there are any books or any figures who stick out to you from that chapter in your life. Maybe that chapter continues to this day. But if you could speak to that, I figured we'll use that as a segue to other things.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I loved classics. I picked it up in high school as well. I started studying Latin because I was so bad at speaking French and Spanish. I'm very interested in languages overall, but like, the whole kind of thinking on your feet and understanding, like really quickly, just I process things more methodically. So Latin was more my style because you don't have to speak it. So you can just read it at whatever, whatever kind of pace makes sense. And then from there, I got into Greek. And I actually thought that when I went to college, my plan at the time was to be a classics major. It turned out I took no classics courses at Harvard. I ended up doing psychology and computer science were the two areas that I focused on. But I just loved the discipline of classics so much and the

• 11:18Speaker 02

  history. I mean philosophically is sort of the underpinning of kind of Western thought. I think it's super interesting. But I've also just been very interested in basically people who shape the way we live, right? So the historical figures who I like learning about. And so there's a set of people like inventors, you know, people who just create things and change the world through that. But I'm also very interested in historical figures who who kind of try to invent or usher in new ways for people to live. So I always thought, You know, Augustus was a very interesting historical figure. And I mean, one of the things, I mean, he's controversial for a lot of reasons. And you know, you can debate all the good and bad.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  But one of the things that I thought was just really always stuck with me about what he did was when he basically stopped the wars, you know, at the time in history, there wasn't really a concept of perpetual peace. The concept of peace that they had at the time was like, this is just the temporary period during which your enemies are too weak to fight you, but they're going to come back. And he basically like ushered in this notion of actually trying to convert a lot of the military towards other trades. Because he's like, all right, no, we're trying to like be more peaceful. We want to build a more positive sum economy. Let's kind of do this in a way where we can get people doing more productive things. And I always thought that that was just a really interesting historical thing.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  And in some ways has parallels today to some of the work that I think is going on in the tech industry around the whole creator economy. If you just think about how many people today basically do jobs that they have to, that they might not actually like that much, but they're supporting themselves compared to where I think and hope that the world is going, which is just a much more robust creative economy where way more people can do things that are kind of intellectually or physically interesting to them. And in doing so, build up communities around that and have enough monetization economy around that to kind of support that. That to me is sort of like the modern version of kind of how do you upgrade the way that people live and work and to kind of fulfill human potential. So I think there are a lot of interesting lessons from the past.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  I think you can also read into it too much, but I really enjoyed it when I when I studied it.

• 13:32Tim Ferriss?

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

• 14:09Speaker 02

  It's a great book.

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

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

• 14:30Speaker 02

  I actually don't think it has any unique significance. So I'm surprised to hear that it was the only thing on my profile, but I do love it. It's a great book. And I think that kind of science fiction, not just exploring certain technologies, but it's also a very compelling story and has good moral lessons. There are parts of the technology and things in it like the ansible for faster than light communication across the galaxy that we had a project at our company that we had codenamed that we're all focused on communication. And I can't really speak to it. I'm not actually sure why it was the only thing on my profile.

• 15:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, just the only book. Not the only thing.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I don't. I don't. I don't think it has some kind of unique significance in my life, but I love science fiction. I mean, I have spent a lot of time reading that. I think it's often a good way to kind of understand what's possible. You know, in recent years, you know, for the last decade, as I've gotten more into virtual and augmented reality and actually starting to build some of these things more. Yeah, I've certainly spent a lot of time reading the science fiction and going back and revisiting a bunch of the books around that. It's just, it's really fascinating to me to see kind of what people predict and what the sociological phenomenon that people predict around this stuff as well.

• 15:42Tim Ferriss?

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

• 16:06Speaker 02

  There are some that are just classics around this. I mean, I think at this point, anyone who's interested in this space would read Ready Player One and Snow Crash. I think Rainbow's End is one that is maybe not as commonly cited, but I think is maybe the augmented reality sort of equivalent of some of the seminal works that talk about virtual reality. One of the things that I think is pretty interesting about all of these is that they sort of posit that the world is in some sort of dystopian state. And that, I think, is very different from kind of how I think about this. I think that there are all these reasons why it is very valuable for people to be able to be present in another place, no matter what their situation is. I mean, I kind of laugh about this sometimes when I like, my family has a, you know, we

• 16:51Speaker 02

  love going down to Kauai and it's beautiful there and we'll be out there and I'll, I love surfing, I love doing a lot of stuff, but I also love being in VR when I'm there too. So it's obviously that's not, you know, that's not some kind of dystopian thing. But I think that just if you look at like equalizing opportunity across the world, you don't have to be in some kind of dystopian situation to want to be present with another person who you care about or an opportunity that's better in another place. So that to me always struck me as a very interesting theme of that science fiction. But in terms of like exploring sociologically and technologically, what's going to happen, I've always found it pretty fascinating.

• 17:26Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about long-term planning and long-term bets for a second. I find you particularly interesting in this respect because you're a founder CEO with a lot of founder-driven control. You're, in a sense, you know, one of the last of a generation and you can make long-term bets. And I know when we were chatting, I guess, last week a bit, you mentioned having a 15, correct me if I'm wrong, but like a 15-year roadmap for Metaverse, right? And what I'd love to ask you is how you manage, say, the short term or the intermediate term within the company with employees, right? Because if you look at, say, Instagram, WhatsApp, the bets paid off, but at the time... There's a lot of scrutiny.

• 18:10Tim Ferriss?

  You know, the media had sort of had a field day and by and large, we're wrong. But I'm wondering, since those types of bets are not necessarily obvious in the moment to everyone involved, how do you think about managing internally when you are making these long-term bets?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  It's hard and I don't think that there's just one way to do it. People are psychologically much more interested and capable of focusing on a long-term outcome when they feel secure in the near term. So when there's a lot of near-term thrash or prospects don't look good or the market is down overall, you know, even if that's not specific to your company, even if it's a kind of broader thing, I think that that that definitely strains people's time horizons. But good leadership is you try to get people excited about where you're going. You obviously, you can't just ignore the the short term. There's a lot of stuff that we need to get done there. And at this point, you know, it's a pretty big company. So I mean, as one of our board members says, we need to be able to walk and chew gum at

• 19:11Speaker 02

  the same time, which is probably a simplification. But one of the things that I've sort of personally learned over the last, you know, 18 years of running the company is like, I remember when I was getting started, feeling like you weren't understood, kind of feels bad. I think that there's, there's a normal human impulse, which is you want to be understood. I think that that's, that's partially why people want to express themselves and why communication is so important. People at some level have this intrinsic desire to be kind of understood and belong and feel like they're, you know, belong with the people around them. And obviously being in a state where you, you're kind of, something that you're trying

• 19:52Speaker 02

  to do is is kind of fundamentally misunderstood or that people don't believe in it can be tough. But after going through a bunch of these cycles, I actually feel like I've trained myself to kind of see it the opposite way, which is if I'm doing something that feels too well-understood for too long, then I feel like I'm just being complacent. So after having gone through a bunch of these different cycles, whether it's, you know, a lot of things that are just not controversial today, but at the time people thought were crazy, taking the, the service initially from being a, a college website to not buying Instagram or WhatsApp, which were, you know, billions of dollars for the acquisitions. But like at the time, people were like, what? You know, I remember, I think it was, um, I don't know if it was Jon Stewart or Colbert,

• 20:35Speaker 02

  but they did a segment that was making fun of the Instagram acquisition that was like, "What? It's like you bought Instagram for a billion dollars of money? Are you kidding?" So I think some of these things, it's like you just, you kind of go through a bunch of these and you have the conviction to kind of push back on the world a little bit and say, "Okay, no, we're gonna get through this and come out in 18 months, 24 months with something that we believe in." And after that happens a few times, you kind of understand that could happen. Most people still will get more of these bets wrong than right. So it's not like, you know, I think it's obviously very important to not get too overconfident with this. But at this point, I kind of feel like if people fully feel like they understand what we are as a company and what we're doing, then I'm not pushing

• 21:19Speaker 02

  it hard enough. And that actually, now I'm at the point where like, that feels bad to me. So I kind of like want to push us into the zone, which is, okay, let's kind of constantly be doing something that can be doubted. Because if we're not, then what are we doing? We have this huge opportunity to do exciting things and help invent things and create things for the world. And if it's obvious to everyone that we're kind of going to be able to do each of the things that we're working on, then I don't feel like we're kind of making the most of what we need to do. So I'm not sure that that answers the original question around internally, you know, how do you get people through it? But I actually think a lot of this, how do you get an organization of 100,000 people through something, is about managing your own psychology and about managing your team's psychology.

• 22:01Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  You know, one of the things that I've always found is you can pretty much, I think, get an organization through and a team through almost any challenge, as long as you can maintain good cohesion. So it's the external stuff that doesn't bother me that much. I mean, it's, you know, people can criticize us. I mean, if they're people I respect, I care a lot about that and want to make sure we do better. But it doesn't make me not sleep at night. When our stock price goes down, that doesn't make me not sleep at night. When there's a new competitor, that doesn't make me not sleep at night. If there's an issue on my team and there isn't good cohesion... Then I'm not sleeping well until I resolve that. It goes back to, you know, the very first thing we were talking about with fencing. It's intellectual and you're managing your energy.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  I think like in order to get through these things and build big, long-term things, you kind of just need to, I think you need to take care of yourself and you need to take care of your core team. And basically in doing so, you can lead a pretty large organization through some pretty difficult times to do some pretty awesome stuff. But I think that it's intellectual, it's energy, and it's about kind of training yourself to be uncomfortable.

• 23:06Tim Ferriss?

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

• 23:14Speaker 02

  For my own psychology, the way that I try to manage this stuff is I wake up in the morning and you get like whatever emails you have of like stuff that's going on in the world, right? So it's world events, it's team events, whatever trends we're seeing across our products. And often in there, there's a fair amount of bad news and like new things that I need to absorb. And one of the things that I've found that just for kind of managing myself is that if I try to just go straight into the day, almost every morning when I wake up and like read through my emails and get the news, it's almost like getting punched with sort of like a ton of new context. And it's like, okay, I need to like internalize this.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  So I found that doing, you know, something physical and something that's like meditative to take my mind off of it for like an hour, so then I can reset and go do work is really important. So that's why, you know, things like foiling or surfing have been really important to me because when you're out there in the water, it's like pretty hard to focus on anything else. When you're on the board, you're focused on making sure you stay on the board and don't mess something up. When you're not, you're, you know, especially if you're, if you're kind of towing or something like that, there's not a whole lot of downtime. So I found that for my own performance is significantly better when I have something like that, that's like meditative and physical and allows me to kind of output some energy

• 24:37Speaker 02

  and then I can come back in. And it's almost like I'll have subconsciously settled all the news that have happened in the world. Now it's like, okay, now let's go deal with it. Now, obviously, if there's something that's really an emergency, I'm not going to, you know, go do a sport or something. I'll go deal with it. And obviously, part of life is you don't always get to control your schedule. And that's kind of how that goes. You know, when I compare kind of how I do on the days when I kind of get to have some time to soak that in, or to kind of have an outlet versus just like jumping right in, I find I'm often like stewing in bad news or something. And then I just, I'm not as productive. So that's sort of my own personal way that I that I try to manage situations like this. But obviously, a key part of this is like having an awesome team. And it's

• 25:20Speaker 02

  not, it's not, you know, primarily about me. At this point, you know, it's a big company, and we have awesome people who are who are running all these different groups. So I get that what I'm what I'm saying, kind of how I've worked out the system for myself isn't necessarily something that would work for a lot of other people.

• 25:34Tim Ferriss?

  I think the meditative palate cleanser makes sense, though, especially if you're talking about things like foiling, where the consequence of a lapse of attention on what you're doing has immediate penalties. So it's, you know, it's regulating in a sense.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Maybe I'm not strong willed enough or calm enough to just do straight up meditation. It's like, I actually need to put myself in a situation where it's difficult to not focus on that thing. Part of this, too, and I do think managing energy is an is an interesting thing. I mean, some of the folks who I work with at the company, they say this lovingly, but I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the eye of Sauron. And that basically... They're like, you have this unending amount of energy to go work on something. And if you point that at any given team, you will just burn them. But at the same time, just kind of managing that so that way I can like manage my own energy and diffuse it well enough so that way it's like, okay, I have the thing that I'm focused on that that day.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  And it's really important to me that I can as often as possible manage my schedule so I can actually focus on the things that I'm naturally thinking about. I just think the engagement that you get of having like an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something, then going to getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better than like going and scheduling a meeting that you'll have three weeks later when, I mean, maybe the topic will still be important, but it's not like what's going on at that time. So getting that balance right, I think, is an important thing for sustainability for the organization as well.

• 27:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. And we may come back to energy management. We're going to touch a lot of subjects. We're going to bounce from the professional to the personal and everything in between. Let's touch on some things that are kind of top of mind or might be top of mind right now, because I certainly have a lot of questions related to, say, the metaverse and a longer term roadmap. And we chatted briefly prior to this about engineering versus science problems. So I think I'd love to unpack that at some point, but let me ask a really specific question first, and that's related to kinesthetic feedback and engagement, right? So one thing that struck me about Ready Player One, especially in the cinematic version, so the movie itself, is that you have this incredible tactile environment where they're

• 27:46Tim Ferriss?

  grabbing objects and interacting with objects, feeling impact and so on. But then you see them cut to an external shot of someone in a, say, trailer where they wouldn't actually have that kind of feedback, even though they have haptic suits in Ready Player One. What do you see as kind of the roadmap for that type of interactivity? I mean, does it? So the more I thought about this, the more I realized, well, surface level stimulation may not be quite as immersive as people would hope for. Do we need to wait for some type of Neuralink type of computer brain interface where we're actually stimulating the brain and not simulating, but actually producing sort of the perception

• 28:29Tim Ferriss?

  of kinesthetic engagement? How do you think about the future of that type of hardware and interaction?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  I think that there's a pretty long arc there. And it's also just pretty amazing how good of a sense of presence you can you can get, even with certain things being pretty raw or out of place, right? The the original devices that we had for virtual reality didn't even have hand presence, right? They just had the headset and it had this wire. So you you kind of had this wire like wrapped around your neck because it it had to go to a computer to to power the thing. And it just over like every year, we basically like knocked down one or two more barriers, right? So then we got Quest, which you got rid of the wire. You got it so that now you could run virtual reality at, you know, one fiftieth or one one hundredth of the compute power than what you have in a powerful desktop with a mobile chip on your on your headset.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Then we got hands and the first set of hands were basically controllers. But now you're actually getting actual hand tracking with like all 10 fingers being able to be tracked in real time. You know, in the next version that's coming out, we have sensors for your eyes. You can make realistic eye contact with someone in in virtual reality. And just thinking about to what extent you can do without some of this stuff. I mean, think about all the Zoom calls that you've been on over the last couple of years during COVID. There's no real eye contact over video conference because your your cameras are in different places. And even without that, you know, it it still gets you pretty far. So in in VR today, adding realistic eye contact, each of these things, it's like you kind of almost don't realize that you're missing them.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  And then when you have them, you're like, whoa, that's like a really core part of the the human experience is is being able to, you know, make eye contact and hold eye contact with someone and like have that gaze. So I think you just you'll you'll just add more things over time, more realistic expressions, more realistic avatars, going from from kind of cartoon and stylistic and fun to photorealistic and having that work. And then at some point, I think you will get haptics. And you know, the way that we kind of think about, you know, haptic glove, for example, you know, screens have resolutions, right? You think about how many pixels are on the screen? And you can actually think about haptics in your hand or anywhere else is basically also having a resolution. It's like, how many pinpoints can it can it make across your your hand? And your hand is super sensitive, so it it can actually, you're you're actual, you know, physical

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Hand can have a very high amount of resolution for haptics. But when we first start getting haptics, they're not going to have that high of resolution, but it's still going to be amazing. And then every year, they're going to, they're going to get better and better and better. So I think that there's like quite a far roadmap on this, which is partially what makes it super exciting, right? It's like you can have a realistically a 15 year roadmap of like, all right, what is it going to take to deliver the, the kind of virtual reality presence that you want to be, you know, feel like you're physically there with another person. At the same time, augmented reality is a whole separate set of problems because now you're putting a hologram in the real world. So that's, that's kind of a, a similar thing there. But being able to just work on a project, that's like a 15 year project where there's a lot of it is an engineering problem that you just need to go build, but a lot of it

• 31:31Speaker 02

  is also unknown, right? So there's like six or seven key unknowns that we just have multiple teams going out and trying to attack different, different approaches at that. I just think it's a fascinating and fun way to make progress. And of course, each year you're intercepting and launching a new product. So I find this to be some of the most exciting work that I've ever gotten to be a part of. And I hope that for, you know, the rest of my career, that I get to engage in more projects that are sort of longer term oriented with this mix of engineering and science and kind of continual milestones. I think it's just a great way to make progress in the world.

• 32:06Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Helium 10. Helium 10, one zero, is an all in one software suite designed to help entrepreneurs launch, manage and scale profitable e-commerce businesses on Amazon as well as on walmart.com. So whether you're an entrepreneur who wants to start a business on your own terms, or you want to scale your existing e-commerce operations, Helium 10 can help. They process more than 2 billion data points daily. That's a lot of data, have a robust 450 plus million ASIN database and provide at a glance analytics like seasonal trends for products, profit estimates and more.

• 32:46Tim Ferriss?

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• 33:26Tim Ferriss?

  Sign up for free at H E L I U M one zero dot com slash Tim.

• 33:36Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to ask some more questions about Metaverse and also the recent announcement related to Instagram and NFTs, just to touch on that. And then we're going to go back and fill in with some backstory and some family questions. If you're open to that, as I'm looking at the Metaverse and have been observing fairly closely web three developments and NFTs and so on in the last handful of years. I've been thinking quite a lot about your long-term planning and then how you must think about sort of secondary effects, tertiary effects of these technological advances. And then I've also thought about, I think it was Andy Grove who had paired metrics. So it would have sort of like a primary outcome metric that they were tracking and then they

• 34:20Tim Ferriss?

  would look for kind of correlated impacts that they could track that were undesirable or should be addressed in advance. And I'll give you an example. So playing with Oculus, I was very impressed with the technology because I used a very early, I want to say prototype, but version years ago. And the advances are really tremendous. And I had an opportunity to chat with a friend of mine who unbeknownst to me at some point, and I'm blanking on the exact game title, but he was something like second in the world or third in the world in mini golf. And that was, I want to say a year, year and a half ago. Now he's not even in the top 500. So there's clearly a large demand for this.

• 35:03Tim Ferriss?

  The number of users is increasing rapidly and it's still early, right? It's really, really early. Now, when I used the technology most recently and I had several ligaments torn in my knee. So I had the experience of actually engaging with it, sitting on a couch, which was fascinating because it was my first time not mapping out sort of the playing. Area and walking around. So I actually had the ability to test it as somebody who was sort of mobility restricted, which was amazing. When I came out of the experience, it took a while for my eyes and brain to readjust to sort of the depth perception of objects around me. And I was chatting with this friend, John, and he said, oh yeah, you know, it takes about two to three months and then you adjust completely to that. And I'm wondering

• 35:46Tim Ferriss?

  what types of societal changes, maybe physical adaptations, you're tracking as more and more people come online and begin to spend more and more time using, say, VR?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  The framework that you're talking about, about having goals and metrics to track those goals and then counter metrics is, I think, a really important one that we basically encode into all of our teams across the company. They're basically things that we're, that we think are good if can enable more connection or more different things across the company. But then there are kind of counter metrics in all of these areas that we're, that we're tracking to make sure that, you know, we don't exceed or don't increase negative effects. For VR specifically, the biggest issue that the people report is still this feeling of motion sickness. And the basic issue, just to kind of break it down, is your eye, now eyes are not, are not computers, but you can kind of think about it as a refresh rate.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  If something changes in the world, it'll kind of take, you know, five to 10 milliseconds for different people for you to sort of recognize that. And if you think about what's technically happening with VR, basically, you're, you have to render this whole world continuously. And if a person changes their head, head position or eye position and expects the image to be different. But then by the time that their saccade is done, which is, you know, what it's called, basically, your, your kind of eye refocusing. If we haven't rendered correctly what you would kind of expect to be in that space, then it creates this real feeling of discomfort over time. It's not like you miss one frame and you feel terrible for most people, but it's over time, if you're not doing that efficiently, then that creates

• 37:27Speaker 02

  this feeling that, that it creates, it's a real physical feeling of discomfort. And this is partially why. The early versions of the VR headsets needed to be plugged into a computer because they needed to, in order to be able to render a world that quickly, you needed a lot of computing power. So it's this tremendous engineering challenge to now be able to do that so much more efficiently that you're doing that on a mobile chip, which is 1/50th or 1/100th is powerful as the desktop things, but get that to work really well. I would say that that problem is not fully solved yet. It's getting better in every generation. And people aren't computers and not everyone is the same and people have different sensitivity to this stuff. So, you know, some people, if a headset is running at 60 frames per

• 38:11Speaker 02

  second, that won't bother them. But other people, I mean, at the other end of the spectrum, if a headset is running at 120 frames per second, they may still perceive some glitchiness. And for most people, if you can get to 72 or 90, you're in pretty good shape. But there are outliers and people are not all the same. And, you know, at the end of the day, making this a technology that can be comfortable for basically everyone is going to be a really critical part of making this happen. So that's probably the biggest effect that we see. Some of the other stuff, like you mentioned, I think you just need some more kind of a longitudinal study. It's tough to exactly understand all the effects of anything right up front, but you want to be mindful of that and be open to the fact that what you're doing could have issues and that you want to improve those issues. And, you know, we try to research

• 38:56Speaker 02

  that stuff and basically try to continuously improve it. But that's the biggest thing that we're tracking right now.

• 39:01Tim Ferriss?

  And on looking at societal changes, we could look at that for a second, then we'll come back to Instagram. I've been very engaged in watching, say, Axie Infinity as an example, and Play to Earn in different forums. And it's been pretty mind boggling to see, for instance, that there are so many players in the Philippines who are earning income that they can now impact large elections, right, as a constituent. And I'm wondering how you see this developing. And this is, certainly Meta is going to be a primary player. There are going to be other players. But where, if we get to the point where, and please poke holes in this if you have a different view of things, but if we get to a point where there's almost a universal basic income provided by the

• 39:48Tim Ferriss?

  Broad spectrum of jobs that you can have in the metaverse or online. What do you think some of the societal effects will be of that? It seems to be certainly growing faster than I ever could have imagined, even though a lot of it is maybe not right in my backyard, but it's certainly on a global level seems to be expanding really quickly. I'd love to hear you speak to that in any capacity.

• 40:10Speaker 02

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

• 40:52Speaker 02

  So you can basically create a building or a store and then that can be inside a city that someone else creates. And then there's the question there of, okay, well, how do you govern that? Who gets a say in what policies? Who can enter it? How do taxes work? Like, what's the basic business model of that space? What are the design codes around like, what are you allowed to build there? All these different dimensions and the physical world is, there's a lot of it, but it is at the end of the day, you know, more finite than what we're going to have with the virtual world. So not everyone can kind of get to be the mayor of, of their own virtual space and see how that evolves. But I think part of what we're going to get to see is we're going to have, they could be, you know, young people in Philippines or anywhere else around the world experimenting

• 41:37Speaker 02

  with basically creating worlds that are not just a single space or an experience, but actually like an environment or a polity in a way that other people can, can kind of be a part of. And I think that there will be sort of pretty interesting innovation, you know, social and economic and, and governance innovation, as long as this gets designed in a good way. So I guess more than any specific policy idea, I think this could end up being a way to basically explore a lot of different ideas and kind of see which of these different environments that evolve are going to be appealing to people in different ways. I think that's going to be wild to watch play out and it's one of the things that I'm, I'm really looking forward to.

• 42:15Tim Ferriss?

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

• 42:35Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're getting at, but one big shift that I think is happening is the rise of distributed work. I don't see that as a problem. I think it's good. There's just a lot of research that shows that people's opportunities, social, economic and otherwise, are generally pretty anchored to physically where they are. And I think, you know, sometimes people draw this juxtaposition of, you know, say, okay, there's like the digital world and the real world. That's not actually how I think about it. I think that there's a physical world and a digital world, and the real world is actually both. And increasingly, I think, people will use these technologies to be able to be present in places that they physically can't be. And I think that that's really powerful, right? And it's like, we're doing this podcast and we're not sitting next to

• 43:20Speaker 02

  each other physically, but it like feels like we're here and we're kind of having a live conversation. And in the future, you know, maybe five years from now, if we were doing this, we'll have AR glasses and, you know, hologram version of me will be on the couch next to you. And I think that that will be even better than what we're doing right now. So I think that, you know, through video chat, you can, you can have moments where you feel present. But I think through things like virtual and augmented reality, when you can like have an office and someone can be walking through it as a hologram, even though they're physically in a different place, I think that you'll just be able to much more naturally unlock more of the opportunities, both social and economic, and I guess others as well, of being able to be around people and be present no matter where you actually are. So people will be free to, to kind of live where they want, maybe where their family

• 44:05Speaker 02

  physically is, you know, in a country that they grew up in, but they'll have all the opportunities that will be available around the world. So that I think is, is awesome. I think it's one of the most promising things about the future. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is sort of taking the conversation in a different direction is, we actually recently did this exercise at our company. Where we were thinking about, okay, we're coming up on almost 100,000 people soon in our company. And we kind of think about our values as a company as like our cultural operating system. How do we get work done well and continue to build the things that we need to build? And, you know, a big part of the values, and I'd love to talk through them here. I mean, I haven't, this is actually the first podcast or any public thing that I've done where I've discussed any of the values. So I think it'd probably be pretty

• 44:48Speaker 02

  interesting to go through it. But one of them is basically, we've rolled out this value called live in the future, which is basically about the world is moving towards being distributed first, both because we think that that's a good trend for how we work, and because we aspire to play a role in building all the technology to enable that through virtual reality, augmented reality, metaverse, software, and infrastructure, and like avatars to express herself. We have this thing that we want people inside the company to eat your own dog food. They use the things that we're building internally as part of how we work, because that's also, it gets us in a faster feedback loop to make those tools better for, for everyone else around the world. But I mean, that's one of the six values that we just rolled out. I actually think it might be interesting to go through the others too, but up to you.

• 45:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, please, please, let's go through them. And then I'll have some questions about them, I'm sure.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  You know, some of them we kept, but we're just changing how we execute them. So one thing that I think our company is pretty well known for is having the value of move fast. I've always basically believed that values are only useful if you can legitimately disagree with them. I always thought like values like be honest are not that helpful because like, of course you have to be honest, right? It's like, I feel bad even needing to write that down. If you have to write that down, then something kind of went wrong. But I don't know any good company that doesn't focus on honesty or demand that of their employees. So from my perspective, that's not like a useful, if you only get to write down like five or six concepts to program into your culture, you want them to be things that good companies can reasonably do differently. And I think part of this is that

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Good values, you need to be able to give something up in order to get them. So around move fast, we've always had this question. It's like you can't just tell people to move fast. The question is like, what's the deal? Like, what are you, what are you willing to give up? And famously, it used to be move fast and break things. And the, the idea was that we tolerated some amount of bugs in the software in order to encourage people to move quickly. Cause moving fast, I think is the key to learning. It's like you want to increase the iteration cycle. So that way you can get feedback from the people you serve quickly. And then incorporate that into the product. So we would literally get into situations where competitors of us would ship once a year, once every six months, and we'd ship code every day. Of course we're going to learn faster and we're going to build something better. If you're shipping something every day. So the question is, what are you willing to give up?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  So it used to be, we would tolerate some amount of defects in the product. It got to the point is that as the company grew, we were producing so many bugs that going back and fixing them was actually slowing us down more than, than we were speeding up. So I still thought, okay, like moving fast, this is still like a really important thing. We've got to change how we do it. So we kind of evolved to building a somewhat less sexy phrase, move fast with stable infrastructure. And then basically the new bet was we were going to invest disproportionately in building up good infrastructure and abstractions inside our companies. So that way the average engineer who comes here is going to be much faster and more productive at getting things done than in other places. And at a scale of almost a hundred thousand people, what this really means now, companies just add process over time.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  And it's all good intention, right? It's like people are trying to make sure that we don't repeat mistakes that we've made. So you just add this like checklist of things that everyone needs to do before they can ship anything. But most companies don't have a counter process to that, to basically garbage, collect and remove processes that are no longer that useful. What I'm really focused on now is just methodically going through and making sure all of the different processes that we've built up as a company still serve us well and in kind of empowering an effort to go do that. So, so now that's, that's kind of what move fast is focused on. Should we keep going? You want to do the next one?

• 48:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's keep going.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  All right.

• 48:23Tim Ferriss?

  So let's do it.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  So the second one is it's focused on long-term impact. Where on the one hand, you want a very fast cycle time to learn quickly. But on the other hand, you want to always keep people focused on the prize and long-term. You know, one thing that's sort of unfortunate, we had a version of this before that we just said focus on impact, but. A lot of people, especially as the company grew, interpreted that to mean, do something that would make an impact in this six-month cycle. Right? So that way, like when you have your performance review, your manager can point to something good that you did and you get promoted. And it's like, oh, God, that's like definitely not what we're trying to do. Obviously, it's good if you can have an impact in the near term, but you want to be able to kind of have a faster duration speed to learn quickly. But it's not always important to deliver something every six months.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  You want to make sure that you're focusing and improving things for the long term. So we've actually made a bunch of changes to our culture. We changed performance management and the performance cycle that people have from every six months to now it's just once a year to make it set the timeframes that people have or longer. The next one is a new one that we added. We call Build Awesome Things. And the idea here is that I actually think that there's a pretty big difference between things that are valuable

• 49:35Speaker 02

  and things that are awe-inspiring and amazing. And I kind of think that our company has been pretty good at building things that a lot of people use and like. But for a combination of reasons, we just haven't focused quite as much until the last few years, especially as we've worked on a lot of this metaverse work in virtual reality and things like that. We haven't focused as much on things that are just awe-inspiring. And I actually think that there's this balance where you need to do both. You can't do things that are just all inspiration and no substance. But I also think you can go too far in the other direction of just doing things that are useful. But I think a lot of what the world needs right now is inspiration. There are a lot of things in our lives in modern day that work pretty well,

• 50:20Speaker 02

  but a lot of what we sort of lack is a positive vision for the future. A lot of the metaverse work, to me, has that level of inspiration. And that's partially why I find it super exciting. We talked about Live in the Future. That's mostly focused on being a great distributed workforce. From the early days of COVID, I sort of tried to put a flag in the ground that we were gonna, even after COVID is done, I think by the end of this decade, hopefully have 50% or more of the company working distributed and working remotely. And I still think that that will be awesome and just unlock opportunity, get access to more talent. And then the last two, be direct and respect your colleagues, which I find as the company grows. One of my colleagues, Boz, has this saying that we're in danger of nicing ourselves to death.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  I think like as organizations grow. There's a sort of politeness that comes in where when you're just working with a small set of people and you're comfortable with them, you can actually be a lot more blunt and direct. And Cheryl always says that the amount of progress that we make is directly proportional to the number of hard conversations that we're willing to have. As companies grow, I think like it's tougher to give hard feedback. So trying to build that into the cultural operating system, which is like, we're just gonna really reward and focus on being direct with each other, I think is a really important thing. And then the last one, and I realize I've been talking for like 10 minutes straight at this point, but I think this is the first time I've talked about this stuff publicly. So I have a lot of things to say. When we rebranded the company to Meta, we had this internal question of what should we call our employees? And someone

• 51:49Speaker 02

  actually emailed Douglas Hofstadter, right? The renowned author and thinker. He wrote back and was like, it should be Metamates. And internally, I felt like if Douglas Hofstadter thinks we should be Metamates, then who am I to disagree with that? So our last value is Meta, Metamates me, which is it's sort of this adaptation from this old naval saying, ship, shipmate, self. As the company grows, you want to make sure that the people stay focused on the long term and the whole enterprise and then their teams, but then also take care of themselves. I think that that's like, sort of having that as a framework is pretty important. So I'm happy to go into more detail on any of these, but I also want to be aware that this is quite a long answer and monologue as it is. So wherever you want to go with this.

• 52:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's pick up on it. And then I have a whole bunch of other things I'd love to get into. But with respect to the values, so I've seen and looked very closely at the values of, say, Amazon, which you know, have iterated that Bezos put together and others. And I think the degree to which values end up the, for lack of a better term, sort of operating system of people at a company varies widely company to company. And I'd love to know

• 53:00Tim Ferriss?

  How or if you are, and you mentioned one example of the longer performance review timeframes, right? Incentivizing these behaviors. Do you have a team that is sort of determining how to facilitate supporting these values throughout the organization so that they, they do have more saturation, so to speak?

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Each of these is basically coupled with an operational effort. We have a set of work that we do that's, it's like move fast is, is the work. And it's basically, it's actually, it's something that I'm pretty engaged in where I will just routinely go and sit down with largely engineering leaders, but also folks across the company and ask them, okay, well, what is slowing you down, right? So in addition to the product reviews that I'll do, where we'll talk about what are the decisions we should be making or, you know, what should we be investing in? I think it's useful to often just sit down with people and have a whole conversation. They're like, all right, what are the things that are, that are basically causing you to move more slowly? And then I view a bunch of my job as CEO, but then also we have other people who just

• 54:07Speaker 02

  work on this to try to go remove those obstacles. And obviously we have to do it in a way that helps fit the other goals of the company. You know, if people are saying, hey, it would make me be able to go faster if I didn't have to care about this issue, you know, if that's an important issue, then, you know, obviously we're not going to just say no, right? It's like, let's, let's figure out how we can care about that issue and do this as efficiently as possible. You can apply energy methodically over a long period of time towards oiling or greasing the, the wheels in the, in the organization in the direction that you want. And I think you can get it done over time. I remember when I was first learning about running an organization, I had this conversation with this guy, Dan Rosenzweig. He was the COO of Yahoo at the time and he's great. He's, he's a, is a great person.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  And he, he told me this thing that will always stick with me, which is that every organization sucks. But you get to choose the ways in which your organization sucks. And which is maybe the most negative possible way of putting it. But I think it's basically if you want to move fast on certain dimensions, you can. But you only get a few things like that. If you want to optimize moving fast, we can do that. If we want to optimize being distributed first, we can do that. But maybe you get like five of these. And we are very focused on operationalizing them and making sure that each of these values is backed up by like real work streams that we have or decisions that we make or processes that we make. And I mentioned changing the performance management tool. For Live in the Future, one of the big things that we're doing is, and I don't just want teams to be working distributed

• 55:38Speaker 02

  and working over video conference. I also want them to be using workrooms and using their VR headsets to, Workrooms is this product. It's the VR product that we built for collaboration. And it's great, it's early still, but it's fascinating. It's like you can, you're in a meeting and you're sitting around a table. And even though the fidelity isn't quite as photorealistic on the avatars yet as, you know, say, the conversation that we're having now. The fact that you can sit around a table and you can see people's gestures and, you know, you can have a side conversations. If there's 10 people around the table, you can turn to the person next to them and ask them a question. There could be multiple conversations going on in the room, like a normal room. But obviously you can't do anything like that over a video conference. There are a bunch of things like that that actually make it in some ways feel more real already than video conferences,

• 56:23Speaker 02

  even though the avatars are still very stylized and cartoony. So, but we basically have a rule that everyone who's in leadership or management should be basically doing at least like one standing meeting a week in workrooms. We want to get the feedback loop going on that. That that team now is overwhelmed with feedback on how to get it to be even better. But I think that one of the outcomes of this is like, I think Workrooms is going to probably learn what they need to do to be a great product a lot faster than a lot of others in this space. So that's kind of one way to operationalize these. But yeah, you got to operationalize them if you want them to be real. Otherwise, they're just words that you put on a website somewhere.

• 56:59Tim Ferriss?

  I want to say that one thing that came up repeatedly in the course of doing homework for this conversation was how relentlessly product focused you are. And I heard multiple anecdotes. I don't know if they're apocryphal. I can imagine them happening though, where if you'd be walking down the street and some kid would be like, Facebook sucks. And you'd walk over and be like, oh, yeah. Well, tell me like, show me why it sucks. Like, show me. And then you'd take like 25 notes and the next day, team would get a long list of things from having actually sat down with someone for like a half hour, 45 minutes and having them walk you through their experience.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  I think that's generally true.

• 57:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd love to ask a few more questions about just Web three in general, and then maybe back step for a second to ask you about a number of other facets in your life with Instagram and NFTs. So I know that the Web three is getting a lot of airtime right now. And I just came from a separate conference where like every conversation involved Web three. And it strikes me that Web two, Web three decentralized, centralized are going to coexist. I mean, I'm no expert, but it seems that people want curation. In many cases, they want trusted third parties. I don't want to always be my own bank. There are good reasons why I use banks instead of not taking on all those responsibilities myself. And I'm wondering how, let's just say in the

• 58:20Tim Ferriss?

  case of Instagram, some challenges that perhaps you foresee. And I can imagine, for instance, if people can turn hypothetically posts into NFTs, how that might affect, let's just say, content moderation and safety precautions and so on, if they actually have ownership of their posts, right? So this is a hypothetical that I'm just kind of throwing out there. But what type of challenges do you foresee coming up in the near term or in the long term?

• 58:52Speaker 02

  The one that you just mentioned is, I think, a really fundamental one. I mean, at some level, you can make things censorship resistant, which has a bunch of equities. And there are certainly a lot of people who feel like their expression is Restricted online more than they would like. But that also prevents, if you really can't stop people from expressing things, then how are you going to fight against terrorism or child exploitation, or things that people think are like really awful? Even the people who generally want more stuff to be allowed online. So really removing the ability for anyone to do any kind of moderation at all in a broader platform, I think is problematic. I think in something like messaging, you know, we don't expect, you know, the people who run our messaging platforms, you know,

• 59:37Speaker 02

  whether it's us or Apple or whoever to go kind of moderate a message that you send in private. But it's it's it's sort of this distinction between the living room and the town square. Right? If you're in a space that's a broader space, then I think that there is a little more need to make sure that things conform to the values that society wants, right? And reducing things that are just really, that I think everyone agrees are bad, like terrorism and child exploitation and bullying and things like that. Taking a step back on your question around Web three and NFTs, I commit a lot of this from the perspective of thinking about the metaverse and how to make it more interoperable and a better environment for creators.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  And do you think that there's there's an interesting conversation to have around Instagram and Facebook and what to do there? But I kind of, I tend to think about that as sort of, how can you help bootstrap a creative economy in these 2D social apps that will be much, much bigger once you get to this metaverse vision over time? I think the reason why interoperability is so important is because, imagine this case. And we get to a point where instead of spending, you know, three hours a day on video conference calls, you are now spending that same time in basically feeling like you're actually present with someone, either because they're a hologram on your couch with augmented reality, or you're in virtual reality in something like workrooms, but but a future version of it where you're like, actually, you feel like you're physically there with them around a table.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Okay, so now in a world where you're spending a few hours a day doing that, you're going to care about how you express yourself. Both the avatar, right? Do you show up as a photorealistic version of yourself? Are you a dragon? Are you kind of a stylized version? But a lot of this is going to be like, okay, how do we choose to express ourselves is through the clothing and what we wear and what we put on? But now imagine that every app that you go to, anything that you do to express yourself, so you get a sweatshirt, it's in an app, you can't actually bring that to another app. That would just be massively stifling for the whole creative economy. Because now, as a consumer, you're not going to want to buy a lot of sweatshirts because they're not going to be that useful, because you can't bring them between places. And because you're not going to want to buy that much, it's going to be less useful for creators.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  And fewer people are going to be able to make a living basically designing these kind of experiences, or virtual architecture, virtual clothes, or different things like that. So the ability to be able to take how you want to express yourself and take your stuff with you between these different experiences, I think is just like a really key technical principle and standards thing to hopefully achieve with the metaverse. So I hope we can get there. And in order to push in that direction, I think it's helpful to start sooner in things like Instagram and Facebook by supporting the communities that are doing things like NFTs. That way, you can get to minting, you can get to bring your stuff around between these different places. But I do think that the challenges that you're mentioning,

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  where all systems, I think, end up being some combination of some element of decentralized and centralized. I think actually a lot of new systems just create value by decentralizing and creating more opportunity in some area by creating a new tool that a lot of people use. But I think we'll need to get the balance right. And that's something that I'm probably more optimistic about the Web3 stuff than most other people who are running these big companies. So I'm trying to push us to be more forward leaning on that. Our kind of fundamental belief is that if we create more use cases where creators can start to do this stuff, then you'll get more experimentation and you'll also just get a bigger creative economy over time, which I think is a huge part of the goal.

• 1:03:07Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Appreciate that.

• 1:03:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's I don't I can't even imagine. I honestly can't even imagine. I have enough trouble dealing with the complexity of a tiny team of fewer than 10 people, much less 100,000 and then the global stage. One thing I did want to ask about, I had Noah Feldman on this podcast a long time ago. You put a lot of time and thought into the oversight board. What is your assessment of how that's going?

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's early. One of the things that I think has been really promising is that society needs a network of different institutions that it feels like are legitimate or have some legitimacy for making decisions in order to basically accept the decisions and feel like they're fair. And I think one basic issue that we've found ourselves in is that there's just no way that any single private company should be responsible for arbitrating so many questions of social values, right? Between free expression and safety or locking things down to ensure privacy versus making sure that the marketplace can be open and competitive, right? It's like these, these are real issues and there's equities

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  on all sides. And there's no single decision that any company can make on, on any of them that I think is going to be universally accepted. So I think therefore, you really want to not set up a situation where one company is kind of has to make a lot of these decisions by themselves. That's why I wanted to create this oversight board. I recognize that we're always going to have to be kind of the first line and we're going to be responsible for making the moderation decisions on our platform. But I kind of thought it was important that we shouldn't have the final say in the most important decisions and that there was a different body. The judicial analogy is something like a Supreme Court, although obviously, you know, there, there are all these differences here. But something that

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  people can appeal to and that we can also refer some of the most complicated cases to and that they can make the final and binding judgment on that. And one of the things that we've seen that I think has been interesting is that It does seem like there's a little bit more acceptance when the Oversight Board weighs in on something complicated than when we just do it ourselves. And I think part of that was we put a lot of thought into making sure that the people who are on the Oversight Board are world renowned in terms of focus on human rights, really focused on free expression as well, because at the end of the day, these platforms are about giving people a voice, diverse, spanning a large portion of the globe. Legitimacy isn't like a binary thing.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  It's not like either it's completely rejected or it's completely accepted by everyone. We were mindful in setting this up, and I think the Oversight Board has also done a good job itself in managing its independence. It is a completely independent organization from us, and it has to be. And its independence is super important for its continued legitimacy. Overall, I'd say I'm sort of optimistic about how it's going, but I think building that sort of trust and legitimacy also takes time. It's not like a thing that you can just turn on in a year and then all of a sudden people think, okay, this thing exists, great. It's going to be making decisions, it often overruling us or rebuking us on things, and people seeing that we respect its independence and its authority and going and implementing that.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  That's, I think, how it basically builds legitimacy over time. But I think as an institution, I think it's really important that we have this kind of independent function. Of course, over time, having clearer rules set in a democratically elected Congress would be, I think, the most useful thing. And we're getting that more or less in different parts of the world. Obviously, it's a little harder in the United States, because I think the First Amendment is great. I'm obviously hugely supportive of the First Amendment, but I think that makes it harder for anyone in the United States to create or craft different regulations that weigh in on some of these trade-offs. But I do think over time, there will be a balance that is struck across all of this, and I think that this is all part of that, moving towards that equilibrium.

• 1:07:49Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  I think in a lot of ways, that partnership has defined the growth of the company. And so first of all, I would give a huge amount of credit for this working to Cheryl. I think she is an amazing person. And if you think about when she joined the company, I was like a kid. She was actually as old as I am now, almost 15 years ago. And I was in my early twenties and didn't know anything about business or running a company or anything like this. And I just think the extraordinary amount of patience that she had, and I mean, in a way is like, as a manager of an organization, it's almost like she raised me like a child. And not just me, I think like a lot of the people we have on the team now. So I think she's exceptional in that way. One thing

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  that's interesting about our company is that the business is sort of oddly divorced from the actual product. Most things, it's like, okay, you build a product and you sell the product. And in our case, I think one of the things that created enough space for someone who has as much energy and is as senior as Cheryl to join is the fact that in the type of business that we have, the consumer part of what we do is actually somewhat distinct from the advertising and the business part of what we do. So there was enough space, I think, in the company to have two people who basically were like primary principals for the company. And I've debated this with a bunch of other Peers and people who've created companies. I mean, I know I you had a great podcast with Daniel Ek

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:36Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe that'll be round two. So I do think that, you know, the separation of church and state, I mean, that's probably an overstatement, but the, the clearly delineated halves of the company, so to speak, lend themselves to that. It's a really good point. What are her superpowers? I know that may be a strange word to use, but I think of say Warren Buffett referring to Charlie Munger and saying he has the best 62nd mind on the planet. And they have very complementary skillsets, slightly different views of the world, although highly compatible values. What are Cheryl's superpowers that come to mind, if any?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  through life with partnerships more than others. I think that there are some people who like, They want a co-founder, they want a partner who they can run the thing with and who can kind of have, they can have that experience with on a day-to-day basis. And then there were other people who were just like, okay, I'll just have a team of, you know, five or six people around me and like, I'll be the leader, the founder, but I don't need like another person. And I just think that's different. Partnership has always meant a lot to me, both in my personal life and in work. I like, want people to be on the voyage with me. This isn't like a solo story. That's like a lot of how I derive meaning in life. And again, you'd have to ask her whether she, maybe she's oriented in a similar way.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  But I think to some degree, I think whether partnerships work over time, probably the number one factor in that is whether you want the partnership to work.

• 1:12:44Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  growing up. They really prioritized family, which is something that I definitely took from them. And I think not only did I take it from them for myself, but it was really meaningful for me in basically who I look for as a partner. And Priscilla, I think, is really focused on this. And she obviously has an amazing career and has way more jobs than I do in addition to being a parent. But the family orientation is a really big deal. My parents always pushed for, they cared that we were, that we like achieved and did great in school. But beyond that, they didn't really care what specific thing we were interested in. They just wanted to expose us to a bunch of things. And then

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  if we were interested in something, then they would try to kind of push us to become excellent at that thing. My mom was never like, you should go fence. She was just like, you know, sports are good. Go find some, some sport. And it's like, oh, you like fencing? It's like, all right, well, let's get good at that. I have three sisters and they're all excellent at very different things. Our family is quite musical, but that's most expressed through Randi, who is just an excellent musician. You can kind of go through, go through the different siblings. I guess I got computers and

• 1:15:33Tim Ferriss?

  Seems to have worked out for you.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. I'd say Donna's like the intellectual one. And Elle has always been the, the kind of most well-rounded and social and athletic of us, which is, you know, as I've grown up and I've, I've kind of gotten even more into sports, it's just, it's been really fun just getting to see how much better she is at me at like skiing and all these things that we kind of grew up together doing. But no, I, I think like that's, that's sort of how I hope to raise our kids is I care a lot that they're going to be good at school. But I also care that they can get exposed to a lot of different things and, and kind of choose the things that they want to do. It's a fun adventure. One of the things in terms of my parenting is I try to No matter what is going on in the day, I always do bedtime with them.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess every once in a while I have to travel, although with COVID, it's been nice. I haven't had to travel that much. So that's maybe one silver lining of the pandemic for the last couple of years. But it's, you know, I just take an hour every day and we read, we like sing, we, you know, it's, I'm reading this book with them now, The Way of the Warrior Kid, which is, is, is good. I recommend this.

• 1:16:41Tim Ferriss?

  Wait a second.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  It's, it's.

• 1:16:42Tim Ferriss?

  Is this Jocko?

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  Is this Jocko Willink?

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Tim Ferriss?

  Look at that.

• 1:16:48Tim Ferriss?

  That's great.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  It was recommended to me. Do you know him too?

• 1:16:51Tim Ferriss?

  He, so Jocko's first ever long form public interview is on this podcast.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Okay, there you go.

• 1:16:56Tim Ferriss?

  And yeah, so I know Jocko very well.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  So this book was recommended to me by Toby Lutke, the founder and CEO of Shopify. And the girls love it. And now they've started training jujitsu and they're like, so this is the stuff, you know, takes on a life of its own. It's super fun, you know, having stuff that we do, that we do together every day. And then I always wrap up the day with them. We have this routine that Max calls the good night things, which is basically every night we go through, I'm like, all right, what are the things that are most important in life? And they're health, loving family and friends, and something you're excited about. And like, what did you do to help someone today? And we basically go through each of these things. And it's like, all right, so health, it's like, well, what did you do to like, make yourself stronger, more fit today?

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  If you get hurt, Max broke her leg skiing once. Let's go through the parts of your body that like still work and that you're going to like be able to use while you're recovering. And it's like, okay, loving family and friends. Let's go through, you know, something that you did today with a person who is meaningful to you. And then I think something you're excited about is, and this is actually, this is like my philosophy on life. I'm just trying to like boil it down for them. I guess the adult version of this is I think you have to have something that you're looking forward to for the future. I think that that's just a really important part of keeping people going with the weight of life. But. For kids, you know, it tends to be something that they're excited about tomorrow. More often than not, it's just like, alright, I'm excited to see mom in the morning. Or like, I get to eat Cheerios at breakfast.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, it's not, not super inspiring, but, um, but the right, the right basic idea. And then every once in a while, it's something like, okay, Max is like, I'm gonna get ski poles next week. And it's like, okay, that's like a big milestone, right? Or it's like, I'm gonna lose my first tooth, right? Or like, I can't wait until I can like have, do jujitsu again. And then the last one, I think is probably the most important, which is, you know, I think especially for our family, and especially for, for these girls who are obviously growing up in very wealthy family. It's like, you're gonna do something nice to help someone every day. This is just like an important service orientation that I think, that I, I just want our family to have. And we just all go around and like, I tell them something nice that, that I tried to do to, to help someone.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  And, and they have to tell me something nice that they did to, to help someone. And it could just be like a, another kid at school, or it could be mom, or cousin, or something like that. But probably much to their chagrin, I don't let them go to sleep until they can tell me something that, nice that they did to, to help someone that day. So that's probably like the best encapsulation of my, how I think about parenting and the values that I wanna try to impart to them.

• 1:19:31Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for sharing all of that. I wanna say a few things. Number one, Toby, one of my favorite people. I've known Toby since 2008 or so. And people might be wondering, why am I asking about family? Why am I asking about parenting? And part of the reason I'm asking is because many people who listen to this podcast, listen to model. They listen to model people. And I think it's very important to get a holistic picture of how people think about and prioritize things in their lives and manage things in their lives. Because you can end up, if you're not careful, say in the realm of business, modeling someone who is, from an external perspective, very financially successful, but they're...

• 1:20:10Tim Ferriss?

  Family lives, their relationships are in shambles.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Tim Ferriss?

  So I do think that the micro can be a reflection of the macro, which is why I like to explore these things. So on the point of things that are important in life, man, I love that you're reading Jocko's book to your kids. It's fantastic. Do not, well, actually, no, someday you should roll with Jocko. He is a black belt in jujitsu and is an absolute killer.

• 1:20:36Tim Ferriss?

  Probably above your weight class, but worth rolling with nonetheless. Speaking of things that are important in life, I would love to ask you about, and this is going to be an interesting transition, the sacred and then the secular. And for the secular, I have a very specific kind of technical question. But on the sacred, I'd love to ask you, what role religion plays in your life? If any, how do you think about that?

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  It's actually, I think, playing an increasing role in recent years. And so, I mean, I was raised Jewish. And I think for, from the time I went to college or so, maybe I wasn't as focused on it. But I think a few things in the last five or six years have made me a little more focused on it. One is, of course, family and having kids. You like, want to have traditions for, for the kids. And a lot of the time it's like, okay, well, here are the things that I did when I was growing up and that I thought were meaningful and the ones that are good, you want to do and the ones that aren't. You don't, but I just found having that community and values grounding was really valuable. So, so we are raising our girls to be Jewish

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  and that's, that's just become a more important part of our, our lives. So it's like every Friday, pretty much no matter what's going on, we do Shabbat dinner. Priscilla actually loves this. I mean, she's basically, it's sort of a meditative thing for her, but from, I think about Tuesday or Wednesday, she starts carving out like an hour or so of the day to like, start cooking the Shabbat dinner. And basically we have a bunch of friends over and it's just like a real center point to the week. That element, I think, is more cultural. Then there's, I'd say for, for me personally and for our company. Probably for a lot of people around the world, I mean, the last five or six years have been pretty tough. You know, if you just look at kind of how people felt about our company,

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  you know, before 2016, if you look at like average sentiment around the company, it's like there was almost like never a month when the sentiment was negative. And since 2016, there's almost never been a month where the net sentiment has been positive. There have been so many social issues that have been kind of brought to the forefront that, you know, we talked about this a little bit before in terms of the oversight board and how it's important that it's not just like one person or one company making all these decisions, trying to balance these complex social equities. But there just need to be things that are bigger than you in your life. So even though our country has a lot of struggles, I probably believe more in democracy now than I would have. I probably hadn't even, you know, didn't

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  think about it that deeply before. But I just think like, you know, believing in kind of democracy in our institutions is like sort of a bigger force than any individual, I think is sort of a grounding thing. But I think similarly, believing that there are things that are bigger than that, like God, I think are also, is also just sort of a really grounding thing for me. So the more you sort of study the Bible or the Torah or whatever, I mean, there's, there is like just a lot of wisdom in it in, in terms of, you know, how to live your life, how to think about creation and building. I mean, no matter what you're doing, no matter how kind of modern or technological it is, I just think that there are interesting lessons. It's like at the beginning of the Torah and Genesis, most of like the, the Bible's

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  basically rules for how to live your life. And, but it starts with, it's like, why does it start in this place of, of talking about the creation? It starts off with like, okay, God created people in, in God's image. And it's like, well, what does that mean? What does that mean you're supposed to go do? But it starts off talking about creation, how God created all this stuff. It's like, yeah, I think that there's like a real interpretation in that that is kind of personal to me, which is a lot of what we are here to do is create good things in the world. And I think that that's like very intrinsic to when I'm having a bad day or a bad month. I just think like there, there's something that's sort of Grounded in, no, this is like what I think a big part of what we are here to do.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Build things that make the world better. And I think that that is like a fundamental thing that is sort of ancient wisdom. As people face challenges in their lives and as you think about the next generation, I think that these are both things that tend to ground you and tie you to much longer arcs and traditions, and that's certainly been the case in my life.

• 1:24:53Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I've, I've actually gone to a number of Shabbat dinners here in Austin with friends of mine, and it's made me feel like I have perhaps a ritual deficiency. It's such an incredibly grounding, nourishing tradition. I mean, outside of the religious context. And it also, what you're saying reminds me, I'm blanking on the book. I think it's 4,000 Weeks, but that's by Oliver Berkman. And there's a chapter called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. Just the relief that one can feel when their time horizon and what they're considering sort of spans outside of themselves.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the balance is to understand that there are things that are bigger than you, but what you do still matters.

• 1:25:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I, you know, I'm going to get to the secular question, and I know we're running up on time shortly, but in the 2010 New Yorker profile, which can't believe everything you read, so we'll see where we go. But among interests that were cited here, one was eliminating desire. Do you recall having this in your interests? And I'm curious about this though, because it is very emo.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  That might've been more of a phase of, of life.

• 1:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  That was the mark emo phase. It's like, all right, we could.

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  Paint my room black. Yeah, no, it's.

• 1:26:07Tim Ferriss?

  All right, we could, we can chalk that up to emo. So emo, emo period, check, explained. I'm going to get to the technical question. Before I get to that though, you did personal challenges.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Tim Ferriss?

  Annually for about 10 years. Which challenge ended up being much easier than expected? And which one ended up being much harder than expected? Either or, just be curious to know.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  I still do stuff like this. I don't make as big of a deal of it anymore, but I, I think just kind of throwing yourself into different situations to learn. New things is I think that's just a big part of life. So which ones were hard? One, I tried to meet a new person every day for the year. That was hard for me. I'm pretty introverted. I built some amazing relationships out of it. I, you know, I started teaching this class at the local Boys and Girls Club with a friend and like mentored the kids for, just talked to them a couple of weeks ago. They were all like, none of their families had gone to college before. And now they're all graduating college. It's pretty cool. That's amazing. But it's, um, I'm super introverted. So I think that that's probably been another silver lining of the whole distributed work

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  thing for me is um, having space to to kind of think and and kind of control my my time and like not not get interrupted by other people so much. But it is an interesting balance, being introverted, but also being pretty sensitive and caring a lot about other people. I think that the people kind of think that that introverts are like, don't like other people or something, and that's not true. I just just get overwhelmed easily. The the interesting thing is they all went in weird directions. One year, I did this like year of running. I just did all kinds of different running. I did like sprints, I did long distance running, and then like my knees started hurting. So then I brought down, did triathlons and we were training for this Ironman. But then I like, I broke my arm biking, so that that ended up not not quite happening.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  So I mean, they all kind of go in in different directions. I learned Mandarin one year, learned Mandarin. You can't learn Mandarin in a year. I I I I ended up studying it for. Challenging one. I mean, maybe someone can. I cannot. Um, you know, we talked about my language deficiency earlier on. And that was partially, I like, I like kind of throwing myself into things that they're hard. And you know, like I said before, I mean, I've studied a lot of languages in my life, a little Spanish, a little French, a little Hebrew, a lot of Latin, a bunch of Greek. But it's actually hard for me. So I kind of, I kind of like doing things that are hard for me. And and obviously Mandarin is is important because I have Priscilla's family is Chinese.

• 1:28:35Speaker 02

  Priscilla and I, after dating for almost 10 years, had, we decided we didn't want to have like a big wedding that a lot of people, we didn't want a lot of people asking us about it for a while. So we did it as a surprise wedding and basically didn't tell anyone. And then the morning of the wedding, we're kind of telling everyone and I, I told Priscilla's mother in Mandarin and I never knew before that if she understood anything I was saying. And I just told her and a single tear went down her face and I was like, "Okay, my Mandarin is at least good enough for that." So a lot of them have a physical element, just because I, I tend to think like people focus so much on thought process, decision making, like how can you be as smart as possible?

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  But I just think like energy level and there hasn't been that much that's been written about historical figures and energy level as opposed to how they thought. But I, I actually would be very fascinated about to kind of understand that. But I, I, I think just, I mean, learning how to foil surf and things like that. It's just, I mean, it's super humbling. I mean, these are like really hard skills. It takes like weeks before you can even like, you can even like get going. And it's, um, and I'm such a beginner, but it's, it's just wild and it's so much fun. And you know, it's like you start off doing this like downwinding thing. I mean, the, the awesome thing about the foil is like, there's almost no friction compared to a surfboard, right? A surfboard, you need to like be in a big wave or else like it, you just stop. But a foil, you're just, you're, you're kind of standing on the board, but you're actually

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  riding this little wing and it has no friction. So you can kind of just, or very little friction. So you can basically just ride it on open ocean swells and it's this great workout. You just like can pump in between swells and you know, your heart rate gets up to like 160, but you're, you can go for like a mile or, or more. And it's just, it's wild and it's a great workout and you can't think about anything else while you were doing it. Because you will fall immediately. Learning new things is like, I think, a big part of what brings meaning and joy to life.

• 1:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  We'll link to some of your annual challenges in the show notes because you've tackled some very hard things, including Mandarin, which is certainly not one of the easier options out there, having been an Estation Studies major back in the day. All right, so I'll ask the technical question, and it may be boring, but then we'll start to wrap up right after that. This is a question from a friend who's a technologist, and he's very curious how you're thinking about computing for smart glasses. So his question was, and this is a bit of a left turn yet again, but with respect to the metaverse, if the phone is one of the best places to do the computing, how do you think about navigating, say, phones that operate on OSs that you don't control?

• 1:31:17Tim Ferriss?

  Or how are you foreseeing the future of that unfolding?

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  have that display kind of holograms with waveguides. Because in order to make sure that the image and the hologram stays synced in the right place, it needs to know what your eye position is. You need lasers that understand where your eyes are, and then it needs to have speakers because of course you're going to want sound. It probably needs microphones because you're going to want to have an assistant and talk to it. Has sort of positional trackings that way of like I'm sitting on your couch as a hologram and you move your head, I'm not moving off the couch, it like needs to know exactly where you're looking at. So, okay, all that stuff to do all that computation instantly in glasses that have that are five millimeters thick. So I think this is like one of the wildest technical challenges of the next 10 or 15 years, which is why I'm so excited about

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  it. It's um, this odd thing where I think sometimes people get really inspired by physically big things, but I actually think miniaturizing things to be tiny is in a lot of ways even a harder challenge. So this is a lot of the work that's that's going to happen. Will it be valuable to have another phone or something like that? I don't know, maybe. On the one hand, you can offload computing, so that's good. One of the biggest things that that basically is a limiting factor is actually heat dissipation. So if you have a processor that's running on your glasses and it's getting hot, it's like you're making your face kind of warm and that's uncomfortable. So if you can have that in your pocket, that's better. But on the flip side, you need to find a way to get all that stuff to the glasses

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  and back. And wireless chips are actually pretty energy intensive too. So at some point, you're going to always have some computation on the glasses. The kind of equilibrium I don't think is to have all of the computation somewhere else. And then you start getting into this interesting trade off, which is, okay, well, if you're Apple and you have the iPhone, is that an advantage? And I think that there are a bunch of different questions in that. One is, to what extent are they just going to advantage their own devices? Or they're going to make it so that some of the APIs are open? And I think that this is somewhat of a regulatory question, right? It's like, are they going to be allowed to just make something that has, you know, they have a billion iPhones out there? Are the regulatory agencies around the world going to allow them to just like only make it so

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  that their glasses work with their thing? It would seem to me like that there would be an issue with that. But then there's this other issue. Which is, if you were designing a secondary device for, say, input or something like that, it probably wouldn't look like a phone exactly. So there's also some ways in which, I think when new computing platforms come around, people tend to assume that that model is sort of gonna work and that whatever the new thing is just sort of a peripheral to that existing platform. But I think it kind of depends. You know, it's like, maybe the watch is more of a peripheral to your phone, but I would guess that augmented and virtual reality are so fundamentally different that whatever you want in your constellation of devices, you probably want

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  it to be designed specifically for that and not just like, okay, you happen to have a phone, so now let's shoehorn it into doing augmented reality too. So I think there's a lot of interesting questions in this, but I don't know, at the end of the day, I think that there's just a ton to be invented and there are a lot of different ways that this could go.

• 1:35:15Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  I mean, this was a pretty wide-ranging conversation. It's fun. I mean, I've never had someone start by asking me about fencing, and I don't think I've ever done an interview where we've talked or a podcast where we've talked so much about sports. I mean, I don't know, I feel like we could do a whole nother one of these. I mean, we didn't go into into science at all or curing diseases.

• 1:35:54Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:36:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  This has been a lot of fun. Thank you for having me on.

• 1:36:06Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:36:48Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to get into at some point, but I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation, Mark.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  It's been fun. Thanks for having me.

• 1:36:54Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get

• 1:37:35Tim Ferriss?

  sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a low carb, high protein and zero sugar cereal that I eat all the time. I ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about

• 1:38:15Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:39:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:39:43Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:40:26Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:09Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:51Tim Ferriss?

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