Interview: Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s metaverse

Casey Newton talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his vision for an embodied internet (or "the metaverse), the challenges of governing it, and gender imbalance in virtual reality today. They also discuss President Biden’s fierce criticism of Facebook’s failures in removing anti-vaccine content in the headlines. Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/22352063 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Neelai from The Vergecast. We have a special episode today. Our friend Casey Newton, editor of Platformer and contributing editor of The Verge, had a chance to sit down with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to talk about AR, VR, and the metaverse. It's a really deep conversation that we thought Vergecast listeners in particular would really enjoy, since it's about the far future of the internet. Of course, Casey also asked Zuck about content moderation and the Biden administration pushing Facebook on vaccine misinformation. This conversation hit all the bases. Okay, here's Casey and Mark Zuckerberg.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Mark Zuckerberg, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Thanks, Casey. It's good to be here. We've got a lot to go through.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, as always, there's a lot to discuss with you. The White House is demanding Facebook do more to remove vaccine misinformation, which I know is on a lot of people's minds right now. I want to get to that. But I want to start with this talk you gave internally at Facebook a few weeks ago, which I recently had a chance to watch. And you told your employees that your future vision of Facebook is not the two-dimensional version of it that we're using today, but something called the metaverse. So what is a metaverse and what parts of it does Facebook plan to build?

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is a big topic. You know, the metaverse is a vision that spans many companies, the whole industry. I mean, you can kind of think about it as successor to the mobile internet. And it's certainly not something that any one company is going to build. But I think a big part of our next chapter is going to hopefully be contributing to building that in partnership with a lot of other companies and creators and developers. But you can kind of think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it and you feel present with other people, as if you're in other places, having different experiences that you couldn't necessarily do on a 2D

• 1:59Speaker 02

  app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness. But I think a lot of people, when they think about the metaverse, they think about... Just, you know, virtual reality, which I think is going to be an important part of that. And that's clearly a part that we're very invested in because it's the technology that delivers the clearest form of presence. But the metaverse isn't just virtual reality. It's going to be accessible across all of our different computing platforms. VR, NAR, but also PC and also, you know, mobile devices and game consoles. You know, speaking of which, a lot of people also think about the metaverse as primarily something that's about gaming. And I think entertainment is clearly going to be a big part of it. But I don't think that this is really just gaming.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  I think that this is a persistent synchronous environment where we can be together, which I think is probably going to resemble in a lot of ways, you know, some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you're embodied in it. So that can be 3D. It doesn't have to be. You know, you might be able to jump into an experience, you know, like a 3D concert or something, you know, from your phone. So you can kind of get elements that are 2D or elements that are 3D. But I'd love to go through a bunch of the use cases in more detail. But overall, I think that this is going to be a really big part of the next chapter for the technology industry overall. And it's something that we're very excited about.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  It just touches, you know, a lot of the biggest themes that we're working on. You know, think about things like community and creators as one, or digital commerce as a second, or building out the next set of computing platforms like virtual and augmented reality to give people that sense of presence. I think all of these different initiatives that we have at Facebook today, I think will basically ladder up together to contribute to helping to build this metaverse vision. You know, my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, you know, I think we will, I think, effectively transition

• 4:08Speaker 02

  from, you know, people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. You know, and obviously, you know, all of the work that we're doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision in terms of building community and creator. So there's a lot to jump into here. I'm curious, you know, what direction you want to take this in. But this is something that I'm spending a lot of time on, thinking a lot about, we're working on a ton. And I think it's just a big part of the next chapter for the work that we're going to do in the whole industry.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this feels like a fairly like far future vision, even though parts of it are kind of visible now and coming together. I think overall, it feels like a very maximalist version of what the internet could be. You talk to employees about from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, being able to jump into the metaverse to do almost anything you can imagine. And probably some of us are already using the internet that way already. But this description feels more like the metaverse that might be familiar to us from books like Ready Player One, or Snow Crash, or maybe like Fortnite Today, where some of the most important aspects of our lives, including our work, are being lived and done inside these virtual spaces.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Are those good analogues for the kind of world that you're talking about?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Well, what I'm excited about is helping people deliver and experience a much stronger sense of presence with the people they care about, the people they work with, the places they want to be. And you know, the reality is that today with the mobile internet, we already have something that I think a lot of people access from the moment they wake up to when they go to bed. I mean, I don't know about you, but you know, a lot of mornings, I reach for my phone by my bedside before I even put on my glasses, right, just to make sure you get whatever text messages I got during the middle of the night and you know, make sure you know that nothing has gone wrong, that I need to jump into immediately upon waking up. So I don't think that this is primarily about being engaged with the internet more.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  I think it's about being engaged more naturally. And you know, today, I think about the computing platforms that we have. You know, we have these phones, they're relatively small. A lot of the time that we're spending, you know, we're basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small glowing rectangles. And you know, I think that that's not really how people are made to interact. You know, a lot of the meetings that we have today are, you know, you're looking at a grid of faces on a screen. You know, that's not how we process things either. We're used to being in a room with people and having a sense of space, where you know, if you're sitting to my right, then that means that I'm also sitting to your left. So we have some kind of shared sense of space in common. When you speak, It's coming from my right. It's not just, you know, all coming from, from the same place in front of me.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  And, you know, I, I don't know how much you've had this experience, but, but I, I have a bunch on, you know, in work meetings of the last year where I, I sometimes find it hard to kind of remember what meetings someone said something in because they all kind of look the same and they all blend together. And I think part of that is because we don't have this sense of presence in space. So, you know, what, what virtual and augmented reality can do and, and what the metaverse broadly is going to help people experience is a, a sense of presence that I think is just much more natural in the way that, that we are made to interact and, and I think it'll be more comfortable. The interactions that we have will be a lot richer. They'll feel real. Um, you know, in the future, instead of just doing this over, over a phone call, you'll be able to sit as, as a hologram on my, on my couch or I'll be able to

• 7:37Speaker 02

  kind of sit as a hologram on, on your couch and we'll be able to, it'll, it'll actually feel like we're, we're in the same place, even, even if we're in different states or, or hundreds of miles apart. So, I think that that is, that is really powerful. And, you know, I kind of think about, you know, I've been thinking about some of this stuff since I was, you know, in middle school and just starting to code. I remember, you know, when I was in math class, I would have my notebook and I'd basically just like sit there and write code and ideas for, for things I wanted to go, you know, code when I got home from school that day. And, you know, some of them I was able to do back then, but one of the things that I really wanted to, to build was basically the sense of, of kind of an embodied internet where you could, you, you, you could kind of be in the environment and teleport to different places and be with friends. But,

• 8:21Speaker 02

  you know, I think some combination of the fact that I probably didn't know enough math to pull that off then and just the technology was decades away from really being ready to do that in a good way. You know, that wasn't the, the, the direction that I gravitated in originally, um, in terms of building different social experiences. But, you know, this is something that I've been excited about. I've, I've kind of thought has been, I, I, I've thought that this would be the holy grail of social interactions from well before I started, when I started Facebook and, and, um, and, and it's, it's really exciting to me that now with the next set of platforms, we're going to be able to, to do this. And that's one of the reasons we're, we're investing so much in. In augmented and virtual reality is, you know, mobile phones kind of came around at the same time as Facebook, so we didn't really get to play a big role in shaping

• 9:04Speaker 02

  the development of those platforms. So they didn't really develop in a very natural way from my perspective. You know, people aren't meant to, I think, navigate things in terms of, you know, a grid of apps. You know, I think we interact much more naturally when we think about being present with other people. We orient ourselves and think about the world through people and the interactions we have with people and what we do with them. And I think if we can outbuild the next set of computing platforms and experiences across that in a way that's more natural and lets us feel more present with people, I think that that'll be a very positive thing.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure that people would necessarily find it more natural to work all day wearing a VR helmet, but maybe it's something we get used to. But I am really interested in some of the things that you've said about like the way a metaverse could create jobs that don't exist today, sort of like holoc economies springing up inside of this metaverse. Like what novel new forms of work do you see happening in this world you want to build?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so let me get to that in a second, but just to go back to your comment about people not working in this all day long. I mean, there's clearly an evolution or multiple in the technology that are going to need to be possible, that will need to happen before this is kind of the main way that people work. But I think we're going to be there by the end of this decade. You know, today, the VR headsets are a bit, they're still kind of a bit clunky. You know, they're maybe a bit heavier than you would ideally like them to be. There need to be advances and being able to express yourself and having higher resolution, being able to read text better, a number of things like that. But we're getting there. And each version is better and better. And Quest 2 has been a real hit so far in terms of how people are using it. I've been surprised. You know,

• 10:49Speaker 02

  we planned on it mostly being used for games and thought that a lot of these social interactions or things around work wouldn't come until later. But where, you know, a lot of the biggest experiences on Quest 2 that people spend the most time in are already just hanging out socially. There are, and there are a number of things around work and productivity. There are even Experiences that I I just I I really hadn't thought about things like fitness. You know, these these apps like Supernatural and FitXR, which you know, you can kind of think about it like Peloton. But instead of having a a bike or a treadmill, the device is your VR headset. And you're basically taking a class in there where you're boxing or dancing or, you know, and and it's it's it's really fun. I I I think if if you haven't tried it out, um, you know, it's it's something that a lot of people are enjoying.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  But but going back to your point about uh work and how this is gonna gonna work. I I don't I I I also don't think this is gonna be all VR. I think it's gonna be AR too. And you know, part of the reason why VR is available and why you have things like the Quest two years before you're you're gonna have AR glasses is because, you know, it's a little more socially acceptable to wear something like a VR headset in the comfort of your own home. But I think to get AR glasses that we wear around throughout the day, they they have to be normal looking glasses, right? So you're basically cramming all of these materials to build, you know, what we would have thought of as a supercomputer ten years ago into the frame of glasses that are about five millimeters thick.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  So, you know, call it, um, you know, it's you you you have computer chips and networking chips and, you know, holographic wave guides and and things for for kind of sensing and mapping out the world and batteries and speakers and like all this stuff. And it just needs to fit um in into these glasses. So that's a that is a real challenge. You know, I I I actually would go so far as to say that I think that that might be, you know, one of uh if not the biggest technological challenge that that our industry will face in the next decade. You know, we tend to to really celebrate things that are big, right? But but I actually think in a lot of times miniaturizing things and getting getting a supercomputer to fit into a pair of glasses is actually um one of one of the bigger challenges. But once you have that, right, so you have those glasses and you have your your your VR headset.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  I think that's gonna enable a a bunch of really interesting use cases. So one is you will be able to, you know, with with basically a snap of your fingers, pull up your perfect workstation, right? So uh anywhere you go, you can walk into a Starbucks, um, you can sit down, you can be drinking your coffee and and and kind of wave your hands. You can have basically, you know, as many monitors as you want, all set up, whatever size you want them to be, kind of all kind of pre-configured to the way you had it when you were at your home before. And you can just bring that with you wherever you want. If you want to talk to someone, you're working through a problem, you know, instead of just calling them on the phone, they can teleport in and then they can see all the contacts that you have. They can see your five monitors or whatever it is

• 13:40Speaker 02

  and the documents or all the windows of code that you have or a 3D model that you're working on. They can stand next to you and interact and then, you know, in a blink, you know, they can teleport back to where they were and kind of be in a separate place. So I think for focus time and individual productivity, I think being able to have your ideal setup, you know, we call this infinite office. You know, we already have a version of this for our VR headsets and it's improving very quickly. I think it's going to be great for multitasking and for kind of getting your environment set up everywhere. There have been a lot of studies that show that people are more effective when they can pull up multiple of the things that they're working on, you know, that are related to each other at once. You know, if you're coding, having multiple windows open rather than single tasking,

• 14:24Speaker 02

  that's a big deal. So I think that that's going to be one. The other area that I think is going to be pretty exciting is basically doing meetings. And I already do a bunch of meetings in VR. And it is, you know, even though, you know, the avatars aren't as realistic today as they will be in a few years, in a lot of ways, it's already, it feels almost more real than, and more like you have a sense of space than a Zoom call because, you know, you have the shared sense of space. If someone is sitting to your right, you're sitting to their left. You know, if you're sitting in a circle, you know, everyone can kind of remember what order people were in. There's spatial audio. You know, you look over to the head of the table and there can be a screen there where people who can't be in VR or AR can video conference in.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  So, and be a part of your meeting from the outside. You can project, different people can share as many documents as they want. So it's no more of this like, oh, I can only share one document at a time because, you know, everyone, you presume only has one screen. And in VR, people can pull up as many screens as they want. So you can share as much context as You want during a meeting, you have a whiteboard, people can draw. It's it's pretty wild. So I I think that and and we're clearly just at the beginning of this. So I think that that's going to be very exciting and and and people can customize their office space and and kind of have it feel like what their physical office is and just be a digital continuation of that. So I think that's pretty neat.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  But then I think what you were also asking about is aside from doing the kind of knowledge work that we would typically do in offices today, but instead doing it in um in the metaverse. I do think that there will be entirely new types of work, too. So, you know, in terms of designing places where where people hang out, you know, this is going to be a massive part of the creator economy, I think. You'll you'll have individual creators designing experiences and places. You'll have artists doing things, whether it's a comedy show, which is it's it's like we we did this comedy show on our on our team and um and in um in Horizon the other day.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  And it was just kind of it was funny to to you know, you you feel like you're there with other people and you know, there's something to it that's just like a little more um engaging than than just all kind of, you know, looking at a screen independently and watching it yourself.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Wait, what was this show? What did you tell jokes during the show?

• 16:36Speaker 02

  I was not the comedian, fortunately, for the other participants who were there. But um, no, but but I mean, the the team that's that's developing Horizon, which is a big part of our our internal efforts in the space. You know, they they try to do fun things like this, just to to kind of build out and and test how the development of of the work is going. And I thought I thought that was pretty funny, but you get concerts in there. You have this whole set of of creators who are building out different, you know, different experiences, ranging from kind of an individual creator to, you know, teams of of dozens of people building AAA games. Where you can kind of have your avatar and you can go across these experiences, you can teleport instantaneously, you can bring your outfits and your digital objects with you. So I think that there's going to be a whole economy around this.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  And I I guess, you know, one one broader point that I'd make here is, you know, one lesson that that I have taken from running Facebook over the last five years is that I used to think about our job as building products that people love to use. But now I think we just need to have a more holistic view of this. It's not enough to just build something that people like to use. It has to create opportunity and broadly be a positive thing for society. In terms of economic opportunity, in terms of being something that socially everyone can participate in, that it can be inclusive. So we're really designing the work that we're doing in this space with those principles from the ground up. This isn't just a product that we're building. It needs to be an ecosystem.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  So the creators who we work with, the developers, they all need to be able to not only sustain themselves, but hire a lot of folks. And this is something that I hope eventually millions of people will be working in and creating content for, whether it's experiences, spaces, or virtual goods, or virtual clothing, or doing work, helping to curate and introduce people to spaces and keep it safe. I just think this is going to be a huge economy. And frankly, I think that that needs to exist. A lot of people need to... This needs to be a rising tide that lifts a lot of boats. We can't just think about this as a product that we're building.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so let's talk about some of those principles that you're going to use to build this. Because I know some people are going to hear this vision for the metaverse and just reflexively wish that you wouldn't build it. They'll say Facebook wasn't governed effectively when it was in two dimensions and trying to build it in three dimensions is pure hubris. And people feel that way for different reasons, but one that has come up a lot over the past couple of weeks is misinformation. So President Biden has since walked this back, but on Friday, he was talking about misinformation related to COVID vaccines. And he said, "Facebook is killing people." How do you respond to the idea that Facebook has played a role in making people hesitant about getting vaccinated?

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Well, I think that our basic role here, and I appreciate you mentioning the fullness of the context there, because I do think that the president offered more context on that after his original comment. Our job, I think, you know, it's, there's multiple prongs here. One part of it is we need to basically help push out authoritative information. We do that. We've helped, I think it's more than 2 billion people around the world access authoritative information about COVID over the course of the pandemic by putting it at the top of Facebook and Instagram. We've helped millions of people, including here in the US, basically go use our vaccine finder tool to actually go get their vaccine.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  So I'm quite confident, just looking at the analytics and the net impact that we've, that we've been a positive force here. And in fact, if you look at vaccine acceptance amongst people who use our products, it has increased, you know, quite a bit over the last few months. So, so to the extent that, that there are pockets of the population for which hesitancy is growing, that hasn't been the trend of what we've seen overall on Facebook. And I also think that, you know, broadly, when you're looking at what's going on in any given country, it's useful to, to look at this from the perspective of that, you know, Facebook and Instagram and all these tools are widely used in almost every country in the world. So, you know, if, if one country is, is kind of, is not reaching its vaccine goal, but

• 20:47Speaker 02

  other countries that, that all these same social media tools are in are doing just fine, then I think that that should lead you to conclude that the social media platforms are not the decisive element in, in terms of what is going on there. But nonetheless, I mean, I do think we have, we have a big role and we have, you know, we have a range of, of strategies that we employ from, you know, we take down content that could lead to imminent harm and we flag and decrease the distribution of content that, that our fact checkers flag as misinformation, but that is not going to lead to imminent harm. So we treat those two differently. And I think that that's the right thing to do. So, I mean, overall, I think we've, we've taken a lot of efforts on this.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  I think our company has made a lot of progress in this space over the last five years, you know, since the, the 2016 election. I think we, it's, it's tough to say that anyone was, was well-prepared for the pandemic, but I think, you know, we built a lot of systems that I thought were, that I think could really come in handy on this. And, and overall, I'm, I'm, you know, quite proud about, of how we've shown up and what I think our net impact has been here. But, you know, managing the integrity of these communities, you know, whether you're talking about misinformation on Facebook or other types of harm. And we track about 20 different types of harm. Everything related, everything from terrorism to child exploitation to incitement of violence. So there are lots of different types of harm.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  You know, it's these, you need to build specific systems to handle them. We have, you know, I think at this point it's more than 1,000 people working on building the AI and technical systems. And I think it's more than 30 or 35,000 people helping to review the content. And that kind of apparatus that we've built up, I think will carry naturally to all the work that we'll do going forward. But, but I think when you think about the integrity of a system like this, it's a little bit like fighting crime in a city. You know, no one expects that you're ever going to fully solve crime in a city. You know, the police department's goal is not to make it so that if there's any crime that happens that, you know, you say that the police department is failing. That's not reasonable.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  You know, I think instead, you know, what we generally expect is that, you know, the integrity systems, the police departments, if you will, will do a good job of helping to deter and catch the bad things when it happens and keep it at a minimum and keep driving the trend in a positive direction and be in front of other issues too. So we're going to do that here. And, you know, for, for the metaverse, I think that there are different types of integrity questions. You know, one of the big issues that I think people need to think through is, you know, right now, there is a, there's a pretty meaningful gender skew, at least in virtual reality, where there's a lot more, a lot more men than women. And in some cases, that leads to harassment.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  And, you know, I think one of the things that, that we've been able to do better in some of our experiences than some of the other games and things out there is, you know, give people easier tools to block people. You know, just be able to have a sense of when there might be harassment going on, to keep it a safe space that, that can be inclusive for everyone, that everyone wants to be a part of. Because ultimately, you know, you're not going to have a healthy and vibrant community if it skews so much towards one gender or the other, or a whole part of the population just doesn't feel safe. So this stuff is going to be critical. It's not just critical for having a good social impact. It's critical to, for building good products. And it's something that we're focused on from the beginning here.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, that's good to hear. One of the things I've been thinking about as I've been reading more about the metaverse is that it seems to me that it promises to host much more information generally than social networks do today, right? Like, this isn't a network where I'm spending 20 or 30 minutes a day scrolling through a feed, potentially I'm spending eight-plus hours here working. And, you know, as you noted, it's not just text or voice communications. You're also virtually moving through these spaces. It's an office, it's a performance space. So do you think that the systems that you have now to work on making spaces safe and healthy extend naturally? Or are we going to have to rethink this, just given kind of the volume of information that is contained here?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Well, there will clearly be new challenges. You know, even in just the 2D world of the social media apps that we work on, there are going to be new challenges. So this is not a thing that you're ever done with. But when we started working on a lot of these problems in a much bigger way, you know, through the middle of the 2010s, you know, leading up to the 2016 election, and really turbocharged a lot after that, you know, we just knew that, you know, if you're going to go and try to build these AI systems to be able to proactively identify harmful content, that's not something that you can stand up in six months, right? We basically put together a roadmap that, it was a three- or four-year roadmap to get through all of the work that we needed to get to a good place. And, you know, sometimes when you're working on long-term projects, it can be a little

• 25:48Speaker 02

  painful because you realize, hey, like, we want this today, but it just isn't, you know, it's going to take a few years to get there. But I do think the reality is that now that we've built up a lot of that AI work and we've hired a lot of the content moderators, I think it will be easier to add new use cases and be able to adapt the systems that we've built to different types of harm. So it's something that we're thinking about from the beginning. You know, for example, the gender skew that I just mentioned, the feeling that a number of women have around being harassed in the space. You know, those are somewhat more acute problems potentially in gaming and in VR than, you know, obviously, that's the thing that exists in the other platforms as well.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  But I think that the mix of the problems that we see may vary, and I'm sure there will be new ones, too. So this is just something that we'll need to keep focused on.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to ask one more question about responsibility. I was talking to Neelai, who runs The Verge, about all this. And he asked me the question, who gets to augment reality? And he talked about a world where we're all wearing our headsets and we're looking at the US Capitol Building. And most of us might have an overlay that says, this is the building where Congress works. And then some people might see an overlay that says, on January 6, 2021, our glorious revolution began. And then maybe some other people see an overlay that says, you know, like lizard people are inside doing experiments on humans. And I think the real question in there is, does this metaverse further splinter our sense of shared reality? Like, does it let us sort ourselves into a bunch of unrelated bubbles? Should we be worried about that?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Well, I think that that's, that, this, I think, is one of the the central questions of our time. There are clear pros and cons of this. I think the, the positive version of this is that if you go back 20 or 30 years, a lot of people's individual opportunities and experience was dictated by their physical proximity. Right? So, you know, I grew up, you know, I played Little League baseball in my town, not because I am kind of made to be a baseball player, but because that was one of the, the few activities that was available. There was, I think, one other kid in the town who was interested in computers. I was lucky that there was one other kid. And, and that was, that was my world. You know, long distance, if I wanted to call someone who I met,

• 28:06Speaker 02

  you know, when I, when I was at camp or something and wanted to stay in touch with a friend, I would have to pay a lot more, right? Because long distance calls cost more than, than, than, you know, talking to people nearby. You know, I think one of the things that is most magical about the present and that I think is going to get even more so is that flattening out distance creates a lot more opportunities for people. You know, and not just in the sense that, that, you know, a version of me growing up today wouldn't, you know, be stuck playing, playing Little League, but I'd get to, you know, find people who are interested in the same things. So I could explore coding and have a much more vibrant community around that, or surfing, or whatever, whatever the thing is that you're, that you're interested in. And I think that that's probably quite compelling.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  And positive. I also think it is really important for economic opportunity. I mean, one of the big issues today in society is inequality. You know, one of the people I think has done the most interesting research on this is this guy Raj Chetty. I think he's at Harvard now and basically some of the research that he's done shows that the zip code in which you were born and raised is like basically is highly correlated with your your future mobility and what your income is going to be. And you know, I think that that that just goes against the sense that we have in this country that people should have equal opportunity. But in a world where there can be more remote work, you know, I don't know what The Verge is doing, but I can tell you at Facebook.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  You know, we've basically, since we knew that this pandemic was going to be going on for a while and we probably weren't going to be in offices. Pretty early on, I was, I basically just told our team, okay, look, stop just constraining ourselves from hiring people who are physically close to an office that they can't go into anyway. Remote work is going to be a bigger part of the future. I think within, you know, five to 10 years, probably about half the company is going to be remote. Let's double down on that now and hire people in all these different places, which I think is going to create more opportunity. But then you have this question, which is now that we're going back and you have this hybrid world. You know, there's there are all these cultural questions of, okay, will the people who are working remotely really be able to have exactly the same opportunities as the people who are physically there with each other?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  And I think when you have technologies like holograms from, you know, augmented and virtual reality, the answer gets closer to yes than it would have been before, when when those people were just kind of video conferencing in on a flat screen or doing phone calls or not seeing each other as as often. The the better that this technology for presence gets, the more you can live where you want, be a part of the communities that you want to. And and and basically, I think that that's that's more more positive, I think, in terms of creating more opportunity for people. So then now, obviously, you also have the downsides of that that need to get managed. You know, in order to have a cohesive society, you want to have a shared foundational foundation of values and

• 30:53Speaker 02

  and kind of some understanding of of the the world and the problems that we all face together. And I think part of what What we're all trying to figure out now is how do you how do you build that in a world where people have so much freedom and opportunity to go kind of explore the things that are interesting to them and get different opportunities but are less anchored physically. But I think we're probably just going to go more in that direction. I think we will solve or at least figure out how to come to an equilibrium on the cohesion point. But I think overall, we should be celebrating the fact that this is going to, I believe, create more opportunity for people, not just in all places in the US, but around the world.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  How do you think about how the metaverse will be governed? If it's like a consortium of different companies, who's going to be responsible for shaping these policies?

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Well, I think that there will be a number of different layers to this. I think a good vision for the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability. Where you have your avatar and your digital goods and you want to be able to teleport anywhere. Where you don't want to just be, you know, kind of stuck within one company's stuff. You know, so for our part, for example, we're building out, you know, we're building out the Quest headsets for VR. We're working on AR headsets. But the software that we build for people to basically work in or hang out in

• 32:22Speaker 02

  and build these different worlds, that's going to go across anything, you know. So, you know, other companies build out VR or AR platforms. Our software will be everywhere, you know, just like, you know, Facebook or Instagram is today. So I think part of this is, you know, I think it'll be good if companies build stuff that can that can kind of work together and and go across lines rather than just being locked into a specific platform. But I do think that, you know, just like you have, you know, the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web. I think there will need to be some of that here too for defining how developers and creators can build experiences

• 33:05Speaker 02

  that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their Friends and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences. So, you know, we're, we're already starting to do some of this. I think that there's, there's an XR consortium, you know, that, that we are in with Microsoft and a bunch of other companies that are, that are working on some of this as well. But I, I think that that's going to be one of the big questions is, is sort of, you know, I don't, I don't think every company is going to have exactly the same vision here. I think some are going to have more siloed visions. And I, I at least believe that in order for this to work really well, you want it to be very, very portable and interconnected.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, there, there's this great essay that the venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote last year about the metaverse. I imagine you've read it, but he talks about unprecedented interoperability as one of the defining features of this metaverse. And we live at this time when the biggest tech platforms are barely interoperable. Like at most, they might let you share some contact data or, or export some photos. So it sounds like you're saying that you are, you're preparing to build systems that are much more interoperable than the ones we have today, at least on Facebook's end.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that that aligns with our mission and worldview, right? I mean, we're generally not trying to, you know, serve a smaller number of people, but, but have them pay us a large premium, right? That's not our business model. We're, we're here to, to basically serve as many people as possible and, and to help people connect. And when you're building social systems, primarily you want everyone to be able to be a part of the same systems. So we want to make them as affordable as possible. We want to make them as unified as possible. And, and part of that is, is making sure that things can run everywhere, can run across different platforms, can talk to each other. There are a bunch of big questions about how you do that. There, there will be privacy questions, there will be intellectual property questions. But I, I don't think, you know, you know, sometimes I, I thought Matthew Ball's essays, by the way, were, were great.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Anyone who's trying to learn about this, I think he wrote a nine-part piece on a bunch of the different, different aspects of, of what the metaverse could be. And I, I highly recommend all of them. But I'd say that, you know, I think sometimes. People may be a little kind of idealistic about assuming that this will develop in a certain way. I think the vision that Matthew lays out, for example, of being extremely interoperable is the vision that I hope comes about. But I think what we've seen from modern computing is that there are different companies that push in different directions. So I think from my perspective, without a doubt, you're going to have some companies that are trying to build incredibly siloed things, and then some that are trying

• 35:38Speaker 02

  to to build more open and interoperable ones. And I don't even think it's a question of is one going to win over the other. It's, I mean, has open source won over over closed source? It's like there are just there are just multiple things. And, you know, at different times, some are expressed more in the technology industry than others. But we're going to be contributing to trying to build a more a more open and interoperable one. And that's that's kind of our goal here. But even within that, there's a lot of questions about how that works, right? Do you is it interoperable because it's decentralized? You know, in the way that, you know, a bunch of the crypto work is being designed now? So there's kind of no central dependency. It's a it's a fully it's not just interoperable, but it's there's there's no kind of centralized control points? Or is it interoperable because

• 36:23Speaker 02

  there are some bodies that that kind of set standards and enable a bunch of these experiences to work together? And I think you'll probably see multiple approaches on that, too. So I think that this is going to be one of the big questions in terms of how this evolves.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  I think I have time for two more questions. So one of them is a little bit nerdy. But you know, when when you read books and watch movies about the metaverse, the fact that these spaces are owned by giant corporations are often the subject of satire. Do you see any room here for public government owned spaces in the metaverse? Something like, I don't know, libraries, parks? And is this something that governments should start thinking about so that they have a role to play as this stuff gets built?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I certainly think that there should be public spaces.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  I think that's important for having healthy communities and a healthy sphere. And I think that those spaces range from things that are kind of government-built or administered to nonprofits, which I guess are technically private, but are operating in the public interest without a profit goal. So you think about things like Wikipedia, which I think is really like a public good, even though it's run by a nonprofit, not a government. You know, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is there are a set of big technology problems today that it's almost like 50 years ago, the government, I guess I'm talking about the US government here specifically, would have invested a

• 37:54Speaker 02

  ton in building out these things. But now, in this country, that's not quite how it's working. You know, instead you have a number of big tech companies or big companies that are investing in building out this infrastructure. And I don't know, maybe that's the right way for it to work, right? When 5G is getting rolled out, it's tough for a startup to really go fund the tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure to go do that. So you have Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile do it, and that's pretty good, I guess. But there are a bunch of big technology problems, whether it's defining augmented and virtual reality in this overall metaverse vision. I think that that's going to be a problem that is going to require tens of billions of dollars of research, but should unlock hundreds of billions of dollars of value or more.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  I think that there are things like self-driving cars, which I think is, seems like it's turning out to be pretty close to AI-complete, needing to almost solve a lot of different aspects of AI to really fully solve that. So I mean, that's just a massive problem in terms of investment. And some of the aspects around space exploration. Disease research is still one that our government does a lot in. But I do wonder, especially when we look at You know, China, for example, I think does invest a lot directly in these spaces. How that is kind of setting this up to go over time. But look, in the absence of that, yeah, I do think having public spaces is a healthy part of communities.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  And you're going to have creators and developers with all different motivations. Even on the mobile internet and internet today, you have a lot of people who are interested in doing public good work, even if they're not directly funded by the government to do that. And I think that certainly you're going to have a lot of that here as well. But yeah, I do think that there is this long-term question where as a society, I do think we should want just a very large amount of capital and our most talented technical people working on these futuristic problems to lead and innovate in these spaces. And you know, I think that there probably is a little bit more of a balance of space where some of this could come from government. But, but you know, I think startups and the open source community

• 40:07Speaker 02

  and the creator economy is going to fill in a huge amount of this as well.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Last question. If you succeed in building a metaverse, will you at least consider giving it all away to the first person who solves a scavenger hunt?

• 40:20Speaker 02

  That's, I appreciate the Ready Player One reference. I mean, just to nitpick on something here for a second.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  I don't think in the future, people are going to call the work that individual companies do a metaverse. I think that that is going to sound, you know, and hopefully if we're successful and collectively in building a system that's more interoperable and where you can teleport between things, it should all be the metaverse, not, you know, each company should not have its own metaverse. Hopefully, in the future, asking if a company is building a metaverse will sound as ridiculous as asking a company how their internet is going. So I think just in terms of giving a sense of sort of where this should go. But within that, now I've lost track of what your question was.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  It was a joke question. But, look, as always, there's a lot to think about here. And I appreciate you coming on and sharing some of the vision.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is an exciting area. It's going to be a big focus. And, you know, I think this is just going to be a big part, I think, of the next chapter for the way that the Internet evolves after the mobile Internet. And I think it's going to be the next big chapter for our company, too, is really doubling down in this area. You know, for the last 17 years, we've worked a lot on building different apps for people to connect. And the main way that they've done that is on phones. And, you know, I think if we're successful, then maybe five years from now, or seven years from now, people will primarily think about us as a metaverse company rather than a mobile Internet company that's kind of helping to build these kind of experiences. And I think it's just going to spend so much.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  It's, you know, people will hang out, you'll be able to really feel like you're present with other people, you'll be able to do all kinds of different work, there'll be new jobs, new forms of entertainment, whether it's, you know, gaming or incredibly complex scavenger hunts like you're talking about, or more and more enjoyable ways of doing fitness, or concerts, or getting together, the comedy show that we talked about. I just think that there's a ton here. And I think we can do this in a way that creates a lot of economic opportunity where, you know, millions of people around the world can be doing creative work that they really enjoy, building experiences, or virtual items, or art, or different things that are more inspiring to them than whatever the jobs are that they may feel like they can do today.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  So I'm really looking forward to helping to play some role in building out this next chapter for the Internet. And I'm sure over the years, we're going to have many conversations about this, Casey.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  For sure. I'm looking forward to writing about all the unanticipated problems that come about as a result of the metaverse, but the good things, too. Mark, thank you for coming on The Vergecast.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Happy to do it. All right, talk soon.