Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Adam Mosseri Returns (Head of Instagram)

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

Adam Mosseri (Instagram, Facebook, Fortune’s 40 Under 40) is the CEO/Head of Instagram at Meta. Adam joins the Armchair Expert to discuss being the suit in a family of artists and designers, how we build up emotional affinities for particular brands, and why his approach to design is based in problem solving. Adam and Dax talk about using intelligent technology to evaluate safety at scale, how the Instagram algorithm actually works, and the arms race of the ability to detect when something was made by AI. Adam explains the process of rolling out new features and dealing with mistakes, the implications of how power has been shifting from institutions to individuals, and his prediction that authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Miniature Mouse. Hi there. I'm using Miniature Mouse because our guest has almost mouse in their name. Oh, right. Adam Miserie. Yes. Mosaire.

Mouseri. Yeah, it sounds like a European version of mouse. Like an aerodite mouse. Yeah. Adam is the current CEO of Instagram. That's right. And he's willing to talk about all the things that are. scary in a very fearless way, and I admire it. And I thought this was a great, great conversation.

So did I. Please enjoy Adam Mosseri. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. When we were building the armchair expert website, Rob actually used Squarespace to get it up and running, which was a smart choice because they've got everything you need in one place to create something that actually looks professional. What really stands out is their blueprint AI feature. It's like having a design assistant that helps you build a site that doesn't look like every other cookie cutter template out there. Answer a few questions about what you're trying to do and it creates something that actually fits your vision. If you're someone who offers services, whether that's coaching, consulting, creative work,

whatever, Squarespace handles all the business stuff too. Payment processing, scheduling, client management, no more juggling five different platforms just to get paid for what you do. The whole thing is designed so you can focus on your actual work instead of wrestling with website tech, which, let's be honest, most of us would rather avoid. So head to Squarespace.com slash Dax for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use code Dax to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Oh, yeah, we try. We hated it at first. Because you got used to the old way. Yeah, that had a special juju.

How long are you in town? Just the day. Just a couple hours? Yeah, I got a couple things, and then it's Nico my 10-year-old's birthday. Aw, happy birthday. I got to get back for Buster. The 20 Busters. 21st is his birthday, yeah.

You can tolerate Dave and Buster. I put ear plugs in. Yeah. Okay, I was going to say, we have a mutual friend, Eric, who kept wanting to do play dates there with our daughters. And last time I went, I was like, I don't know what's up with my sensory system, but it's way too much. It's wildly over the stimulating. Yeah, it's too much.

It makes me feel like I'm getting attacked. My eight-year-old wanted to go for his birthday. This was November. And my wife signed up. She's like, cool, we'll take the whole class, 25 kids. Oh, my God. And she's like, and we'll got him, like, no other parents. She's ambitious.

She's insane. It ended up being, like, five adults, because a couple parents did come, and we rented a bus. She's a genius. She got them all yellow vests to like label them. That wouldn't have flown at my birthday party. Like, Mom, we look like dorks and crossing guards. They were eight. They thought it was cool.

They were just like, I don't care. Oh, they didn't even think about it. I made them like, I was counting them off like one, two, three. I'm like, what number are you? I don't know. Oh, God. This was an eight-year-old birthday party. Wow, you guys.

They're 10, 7 and 4, but now they're 11, 8. They're 10, 8 and 5 now. The bruiser is 5. He'll be 6 soon. And what are the names? again. Nico, Blaze, and Elio. He's great. Really great. They are wonderful and they also

are just exhausting. The youngest one is like the brute. Really? Yeah, yeah. He plays soccer with his brothers. They don't take it easy on them. They just beat them. And then he goes and plays soccer with his own age. I took him to his older brother's soccer game and he's like, oh, I scored a goal. I was like, oh, cool. How many goals did you score? He goes, I scored 15. And I was like, he's clearly lying. He's five. So I called his mom and she's like,

Oh, no, he definitely scored. No way. I know that all the time on here, which is like, I thought I was so weak and so bad at skateboarding because my brother's five years older than me. And then I got to school and was like, hold on a second. I think it might be strong. Someone told me recently, I don't know if this is true, but they told me that a disproportionate number of successful athletes are little siblings. I mean, that would make sense because you're competing with somebody so. And you immediately want to.

It's like as soon as they do it, you want to do it, even if you're way too young for it. Chris and I ended up on a trip, and it was with all strangers. I didn't know anyone. And when we got to the airport, you were there. Yeah. And I really felt like, oh, well, fucking thank God. Adam's here. I know Adam.

And I really, really loved him as a guest. Yeah. Like, I do remember being charmed by you like crazy. I was really new to the role. Because it must have been 2019, 2020. I guess. That you were on? That I was on.

Yeah. Maybe 2019. It was a long time ago. So I was new to the role. So I was still trying to figure out what was what. But I remember having a lot of fun. We hadn't seen each other in years before that trip. Right.

Yeah, and you know, I was watching, of course, some interviews with you prior to your arrival. I just wanted to start with a little bit of compassion. Do you have a hard job to talk about? Because you're really at the forefront of like a lot of things people are concerned about. It's AI, it's social media, it's politics, it's deep fakes. It's like everywhere you're going, you're pretty much being asked. Are you sweating? Just hearing all those things. I saw your face go.

Yeah, so we are at the intersection of a lot of contentious things. And so it is tricky. before I worked at Instagram, I worked on Facebook for a long time. And I remember a really long time ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago now, I just felt like, and we talked about this at the company, that we weren't participating in the conversation, and there was all these conversations happening about tech, about social media. And so my position was like, look, we got to participate.

Whether we want to or not. Yeah, we can put our heads in the sand, but this conversation is happening. Yeah. We might as well participate. And so I'm going to get out there and I'm going to start talking to people, and I don't want to start traveling. I showed up a lot on Twitter. because that's where all the journalists were.

I was clear, internally, I was like, look, I'm going to do this, and hopefully it'll work, and at some point it won't. I'll say something silly, and everyone will hate me, and I'll stop. That's what happens. Yeah. That was the game plan. But it will be better for having done it for a couple of years before I get destroyed. Wait, can I say before we get too far that Adam said something very nice about us on Instagram. Did you see this?

He did his wrap up of podcast he likes. But I misread the question. I know. I laughed so hard. Someone sent it to me and was like, you're his favorite food or whatever the question was. I was like, what's your favorite food? And I don't know why I had podcasts on the brain.

Maybe the next question was about podcast. So I rattled off a couple of pods I love. And then everyone, like, the comp scene was like, what's wrong? I laughed so hard. I just do them between meetings on Fridays. It's not like a production. Yeah. Right.

It's not very well thought out. No. It doesn't need to be. That's okay. I thought it was very funny. And flattering. Yeah. Yeah.

To be your favorite food I was like, oh God, that's not the best. Yeah, what do we taste like? Are we salty? Are we sweet? You got a burger and a chili, dark. I think we're savory, I like to think. I do too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some sweet stuff out there. I dabble in it. Well, maybe there's some relish. Mm-hmm. On the hot dog. There's some garnish. You really laid on the emphasis on the relish.

A relish. I think relish came up yesterday. Oh, garnished it. Garnish. A gritty garnish. That's right. Yeah, you didn't like that. And I thought it was.

I said I'd sleep on it and I like it now. Anyways, I'm just really sympathetic. Because not only you have to go out and talk about these issues and so often you're being asked to be clairvoyant, that's really what people want to know. It's like, well, in one year, what will AI be doing? In two years, what's it going to be? What will Instagram be in this iteration? And it's like, you don't know any better than anyone else.

I go to these conferences, the fucking people who are designing this shit, they don't know. Most of the good ones will admit that. Like, nobody knows what the timeline is. They don't know what the ceiling of it. its aptitude is. No one knows, but we need you to know. Yeah, yeah. That is attention, and I do think some of us in this industry really pride ourselves on being able to put pen to paper on what's going to happen. And I try to find that that sometimes feels like false precision and it's a little bit more driven by our own wanting to be able to do that and to be, you know, prescient. But I think

it's as good to always be honest about what you know and you don't. And then to also qualify things, not in a way to couch, but to be like, look, I think this is probably what's going to happen and why. But if this other thing happens, maybe we're going to go left instead of right. The world's changing more and more quickly. It's full of nuance. It's all gray. You have to embrace that ambiguity and that uncertainty. Otherwise, I feel like it's going to bite you. Okay, so now I also want to, this is the value of having spent a weekend with you. This wasn't clear to me the first time we interviewed you, which I know that you come from a design background, but it didn't set in. And as I spent,

spent time with you, you're very much an artist and a designer. That's what you have wanted to do, set out to do. That is who you are. It's almost weird you're in this role in some way. Yeah, it's a little weird. I mean, so I romanticize the specialist, the amazing architect or the amazing graphic designer or the amazing machine learning or any guy engineer. But it's just not my shape. I'm not great at anything.

I just have a lot of range. That's my strength. Generalist? Yeah, I'm a generalist, for sure. I need that. And so for me, it's been important. This happened maybe when I was right around 30 to embrace that about myself. Before 30, I was always trying to be a designer.

I'm the son of an architect. My mom's an architect. My brother's a musician. My sister's a designer. So I'm like surrounded by, I'm the suit. Yeah, you guys are like a squid-in-the-wale family. They're like New York kind of intellectual artistic. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So I do think it's a bit ironic that you've ended up where you've ended up. Yeah, yeah. Can you tell people what your role is just in case? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. I lead the Instagram team. So I'm the head of Instagram at Meta. I also support the Threads app as well.

We're going to get into how much I made fun of you. Ooh. My running bit with him for three days was making fun of threads. He did, but it wasn't as bad as the fact that my wife has not installed it. Got to keep you humble. Well, she's at an age, I'm sure I'm done with the new. That's how I felt about TikTok. I'm like, no, I'm going to sit that out.

I can't do it. Yeah, she's got what she uses and what she doesn't, and she does not care about my world. at all. It's great. But you do have the title of CEO of Instagram, yeah? Yeah. We say head of Instagram. Isn't that funny? They do. All the tech companies, they have their own fingerprint on what they call

people. It's very specific. I find the world's very interesting. That's a very nice, interesting is what my mom would say when she's like, oh, he's interesting. We are particular and odd in our own special ways. For sure. I will acknowledge that. Yeah, and obviously there's enough social science to back up

the fact that cultures are really important at organizations. But I think if you're at a certain threshold of intelligence, a lot of it sounds condescending. That's what triggers me when it's like, I'm mopping up the toilet and you're calling me a partner or whatever, buddy. I'll keep you the context. For us, it's a little bit like, Instagram is not its own company. It's part of a bigger company. And there's pros and cons to that, but there's a lot of pros for us. Like people move back and forth between the teams or built on top of the same safety systems, the same ad system, et cetera. And so we try to make sure we use language that

embraces the fact that it's part of a bigger company, not its own company. So that's the inside baseball on this language bit. Also just because it's important for people to know. Like, I don't want people to be surprised that Instagram is owned by Meta. And Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp and these other things. Yeah. It's also very fascinating how much public opinion can vary within the offshoots of still the same company. I grew up working for General Motors and that had that as well.

Yeah, yeah. A Cadillac is such a different vibe than Chevrolet. A house of brands. Saturn is your progressive younger consumer. It's all General Motors or the fucking motors are coming out of the same plant. But it is just kind of shocking how many different opinions. Well, we build up emotional affinity for these different brands. I'm trying to think of a good example.

In the world of like soda and drinks, how many different companies does Coke own? You might be anti-cote and pro. I forget which water is theirs. Sure, it's smart water. I don't know that that's it. Oh, no, I'm going to get yelled up. Desani. Is it?

Is it? say that. I think it's Desani. Oh, yeah. There are some people, yeah. I think there's... I think there might even be like a big war between Aquafina and Desani. Like those are the camps. Yeah, and I think they're both Coca-Cola, but Rob will look at it. I'm saying it.

Just throwing shade. I'm serious. There's salt in it. Electrolites. No, I do love electrolytes. Desani is Coke. Aquafina is Pepsi. Oh, well, that's a legit battle.

Yes. Yeah, that's real. That's shocking that I love Aquafina, that that's my pick. I know. Because I bleed Diet Coke. Oh, yeah. See, again, as you're saying, we're proving your point. I got through college on Diet Coke.

Choir just did a pot on them recently. Oh, they did. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm excited to because those two guys are really smart. They also have different recipes for different countries, though, which I think is interesting. Coke in Mexico tastes pretty different than Coke in the U.S. for instance. And that supposedly is due to whether it's cane sugar or high fructose. But I don't know. I don't want to get sued by either Mexico or the U.S. contingency.

The country of Mexico. Who's Jack Sheper? Okay, so all to say, I'm going to ask you all those similar questions. Great. And they probably will have a tiny bit different bent coming from us. But before that, I just want to double back on the design fact. As I watched you interact with people, and I had to assess from afar what I think your skill set is, is you have a very, very intuitive aesthetic that you trust deeply.

And you're a great challenger of people in hierarchies. and with some kind of savvy that has allowed you to still exist. So. And were they getting crushed. Yeah, yes. It'll happen eventually. Yeah, yeah. Again, like you being in public, this could be the days.

Yeah, yeah. Here we go. Microphones are right here. Good place to end. You're holding the loaded weapon. If I'm going to go down, this is a great place to have. Can you agree with that assessment at all? Yeah.

I'll take the compliment. Design is about problem solving at a fundamental level. And I think you can apply problem solving to any industry, right? So you're trying to identify what are you trying to get done, what are the different options, what are the tradeoffs. These are pretty standard patterns that you can apply elsewhere. And so that's the kind of structured thinking that I have to do in my job, even though I'm not designing anything anymore, even though I would like to. That lends itself to being comfortable in debate because you can have a position and a reason for that idea and you're comfortable articulating that reason. And it's not personal to you, obviously, right?

It's a function. You're arguing how functional this is. Exactly. But that's the thing that designers, and I'm not an exception when I was a designer, often struggle with, is divorcing your sense of self-worth from the worth of your work. And critique is like a whole part of design where you're going to go and you're going to show your stuff and people are going to rip it apart. And you have to embrace the signal and understand that it's not an attack on you. It's a way to support you by improving the work itself. And I didn't learn that properly because I didn't go to design school, really. I learned that from a handful of young designers who went to proper design school who joined Facebook in the early years,

who brought that culture to Facebook, and I learned a lot from them. Am I wrong that you had a couple of defining moments in your career where you did challenge Mark on something specifically? A couple of things, yeah. Yeah, what were the things? So, okay, a couple different ones. I'm sure in the thing, which ones I may have told you about, but I might just share other things. I'm not supposed to share it. Well, look, I think careers are often defined by a few major decisions.

which may be informed or uninformed. And for me, there were a couple. The first one was I was a design director at Facebook. I was managing a bunch of designers. And there was this project that became the Facebook phone. And all the PM leadership ended up leaving the company for different reasons. Some personal, some professional. So it was this giant crater where the leadership was

and what we call product management are the PMs. And I just declared myself the PM. You can't do anymore. You have to interview. because that's a reasonable thing to do to have a job. But this was, you know, a long time ago, probably 13 years ago. And me, Mark definitely told me not to do it. Mark was like, you're a designer.

You shouldn't do that. But I did it. He was nice about it. About six weeks later, it was late on a Friday. I was at the office. He was complimenting me. But he said, you're doing a lot better in this role than I thought you were. It is very marked way of complimenting someone.

Exactly, which is great, which I took the signal. So there's been a couple instances like that over the years. Some with Mark and disagreeing with him, some otherwise, where you make these decisions. And I wasn't doing it because I thought it was a good career decision. I was doing it because I was working on the project. There was a need. And I just was trying to fill that need. But I got lucky because, like I said before, I'm a generalist.

And PMs are basically generalists. You work with the designers, the engineers, the comms people, the lawyers, the policy people. You're a translator now? You have to be able to speak each person's language well enough to bridge all these communication gaps. Absolutely. You're a bridge across everybody. If somebody doesn't know something on your team that they should know, that's probably on you. Right.

And so my career, for a couple of reasons, but this was probably the main one, started taking off because I was in a role that matched my skills much better. I was a middle of the pack designer. I made up for it with sheer work, like hours. Abundance. Yeah. In terms of like raw talent, middle of the pack is maybe even a little generous. And so I did well, but by sheer force of will.

And then when I kept working hard, but my role embraced my strengths and weaknesses, then things started to accelerate. Okay, so my guess my first question is, how are you guys? Let's just leave what's on the app alone for one second. And just how have you guys been able to utilize AI in the running of the product? So a couple different things. So one thing that we've been doing for a long time is, and this is controversial, we rank content. We try to show you the content we think you're the most interested at the top. And we've been using different forms of AI for that for many, many years.

Another thing we do with AI for many years are forms of it is we try and classify content. So it could be something positive. Like, is this about a certain topic that you're interested in? Or it could be negative. Does this violate our community guidelines, therefore shouldn't be on the platform? And that the AI sifting through all that material and trying to put those in buckets. Because there's however you want to count tens, hundreds, even millions, or billions of things uploaded a day, We can't have people review all of it.

So we use technology to look at content at scale. And to be clear, and this is changing, but historically, I've said this before, people are better at nuance and technology is better at scale. And so we've had to focus on things that are less nuanced, like what our rules are, because technology hasn't been as good at understanding nuance historically. And humans are so crafty at quickly figuring out what is triggering the safety net. Oh, yeah, it's very adversarial because one challenge we have is spammers who are constantly trying to work around all of our safety protections. You'll have bots, for instance, but bots that don't post every second 24 hours a day, they pretend to go to sleep, they pretend to go to work, they're inconsistent, they add spelling mistakes.

What's the Japanese word for imperfection? I don't know it. It's a second day in a row. We can't get it. Wabi-sabi. It's wobby. It's not. It's the one that has the gold that you piece together.

Oh, that's a specific art form where they take broken ceramics and they put it back together with gold lining. Correct. And it's like the imperfection's really that stuff is beautiful. And it has a name and we're all supposed to know it. It's applicable. There's a word that's not as helpful

in Japanese for Instagramable which I learned when I was there recently, which was Instabaya. Oh, really? Meaning it's like so aesthetically pleasing. It's like, yes, exactly. I'm like torn on how I feel about that. That's the thing.

What's happening to us now, though, is we're building AI products that are more natively AI into the product, into the app. I say product. That's Silicon Valley speak for like the apps. But the other thing that's happening to us is we are also getting really disrupted ourselves. Like how we build, how we write code, how we do research, how we analyze data is changing really quickly. Yeah. And so we are also having to reinvent how we do what we do, which I think some people outside of the industry don't realize because they're like, oh, tech is just kind of.

going to keep doing tech, it's very different. Yeah. And it's going to get a lot more different over the next year or two. And so I can tell you some things that we're doing now, but honestly, I think it's all changing really fast. People are very right to be concerned because the power of these products is enormous. We've never seen this before, right? So it is the most powerful thing.

So it does deserve the most amount of scrutiny. But also, nothing operates perfectly. Everything is iterations built on previous mistakes. and correcting those mistakes. So the notion that, again, people are going to be able to be clairvoyance, even like when I listen to that rabbit hole about YouTube and its algorithm of increasing engagement, everyone had great intentions. No one really could foresee, oh, it's going to radicalize people.

They didn't think, oh, well, what will be more exciting is more and more radical content, and it starts at Jordan Peterson, and then you're a white nationalist. I'm sympathetic to that, to some degree. Now, it has to be immediately corrected at the moment that's discovered all hands on deck to fix that problem. But again, there's probably, like what you're saying, is this illusion that because you guys are creating the product that you're not also victims of it all as well. No one's really immune to the challenges of this AI growth. We're not immune to it at all.

I mean, I would say two different things. One on the industry and the scrutiny and the size is not only is it big and important and obviously a lot of power in the hands of a small number of companies, it also grew really quickly. There are other industries that are equally important, but they took decades or centuries to get to their scale. I don't know, railroad, the automotive industry, electricity. Exactly. Yeah. It was 10, 20 years from not a thing to a big deal. Yeah.

And so that's tough because society doesn't have time to really adapt or consider it or get comfortable with it. Laws take much longer to happen as well. So we're dealing with that now as a sort of a backlog of incoming compliance work. And the second they understand the tech. To legislate, it's gone. Yeah, exactly. But on the second thing, an app like Instagram, you make a lot of decisions as the team running it, and you have a lot of responsibility.

But what you are mostly doing in some ways is designing a system that has rules. You could almost think about it as like a city, right? You know, it's like, where are the roads? What are the speed limits? Where are the traffic lights? But then people fill it. And they decide what to do. I'm not trying to pass the buck.

That doesn't mean that you don't have responsibility as the planner. But that responsibility is different. It's indirect. You have to set healthy incentives. You have to, in our case, moderate content effectively. Even outside of the world of really high scrutiny areas, the decisions you make about the design of Instagram will affect the vibe, how it feels. Is it more positive or is it negative?

Is it more about debate? Is it more about visual expression? Yes. And you're right. It's a great point as the city because it's like, yes, we'll install these traffic lights at all these intersections. And then people will blow red lights. drive drunk, and it's questionable whether now the city's responsible. The light was hung. So it is really

tricky to figure out where the culpability lies. Yeah. Look, I just think the responsibilities are shared, and they're just different. We have to understand how the system works. We have to set healthy guidelines and rules. We have to enforce those rules effectively and consistently and appropriately. But people could just decide not to open up Instagram tomorrow, or they could decide to try to use the hell out of it tomorrow. But there is an acknowledgement, right, that it's so hard to not open up Instagram. And I mean, good job, you know, but it's built to get you to keep pressing it. But I guess if we're doing the metaphor about the city, it's like, okay, we hung the light,

but we know everyone runs that light. And, oh, well? Well, I don't think running the light is using Instagram. I think running the light is, like, posting something that's against their rules. But yes, obviously we are interested in creating something that people are going to use more. We think if you use it more, on average, it's a sign that it's valuable to you in some way. Right. But there's well-spent time and there's time poorly spent.

We're not ignorant to that fact. So we try not to use tactics that make you use Instagram or convince you to use Instagram that it's going to make you regret using it later. And we try to focus more on ones that you're going to be more excited about how you felt about the product later. So we do things like, we don't just look at how many things you like or how much time you spend. And we have these like worth your time surveys where actually we do a lot of these where we'll ask you, was this thing worth your time? And we see are people's answers to that question trending up or turning down over time?

So it's a balance of different types of goals. It's funny too because yes, I'm critical of that and then. But when I turn the lens back onto us, I go like, I don't feel guilty that people would listen to our show six hours a week. We put out six hours of content a week. I would want them to listen to all six hours. That would be my dream. You know, because I think what we're doing is good. It's tricky because I believe in it.

And I'm not really too concerned with how much times people are spending or, quote, wasting on this, which I believe in. It's a little hard for me to then be critical of someone else that has a creative endeavor that they also want people to consume. It's tricky, but I think you can do both. I think the scrutiny is merited because the importance is there. And I think there are responsibilities. I just think that evaluating how we do is not the same as evaluating how a person behaves because it's a platform. There's lots of people. What you control and what you don't is.

different. What's appropriate for you to do and not do is different. Like, I don't think you want a tech company in Silicon Valley deciding this topic is the most important topic today or this news event is the most important news event today and we're pushing that out. Or a dancing video is irrelevant and a waste of everyone's time. Exactly. But you also don't want us to be agnostic. I really don't think that you can pretend that we're neutral. We make decisions those affect how people use the product, what they see, and therefore those responsibilities that come along with those decisions. Have you guys ever approached this with the Danny Kahneman framing of thinking of multiple selves? And for a shortcut, we'll call one the experiential self and one the narrative self.

So one is the you that lays in bed at night and evaluates your day, evaluates where you are in this broader story of your life. Am I reaching my goals? Am I the family member I want to be? And that's your narrative self. And then the experiential self is like, ooh, boobs. Forcepower, right? Like, that's instantly the experience itself is a self you have that you're servicing. And I can almost think of your, was this useful to your time as being like trying to strike a balance

between that narrative self and the experiential. Well, the experiential is good, but also it doesn't give you a hangover from having used it. I talk about the tension as your first order preferences and your second order preferences. There's also a connemouth. Yeah, I like chocolate. It tastes good. That's a first order preference. I also want to be healthy and I want to eat healthy.

You don't want diabetes. I want to not want the chocolate. And so that's a second order preference. And I think one of the things that the industry needs to be honest about and struggles with is that we optimize for things that we can measure. And it's much easier to measure your first order preferences than your second order preferences. Did you like this thing in the next 500 milliseconds is pretty easy for us to tell. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you talk about it with a friend that night at the dinner, or did you feel good about it the next day when you thought about it? Did you go to the GoFundMe page and donate money to that cause you were made aware of on there? You can measure these things. It's just more difficult. And I have found in my time in this industry, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between how easy something is to measure

and how important it is. But there is a strong correlation between how easy something is to measure and how much we optimize for it, not out of any malicious intent, but just because... That's what's available. That's what's available. So where I have to... do is always push the teams to get more creative about trying to understand these second

order preferences or this narrative self so that we can actually lean into it like that's why i really love the dear algo stuff have you guys seen this yet what's that that's actually not the external name that's just how i say it it's called your algorithm two years ago there's a meme on threads where people were writing letters to the algorithm making requests oh wow stop showing my high school friends kids photos like i do not care like that kind of stuff and so that in inspired this, and then the tech got to the place where we could do it. So it's only in the Reels tab right now. But if you go to the Reels tab in the top right, on the U.S.,

there's these little sliders with these hearts, and it will tell you what we think you're interested in, and then you can make edits. And you can say, I actually want to see these things. I don't want to see these other topics. Wait, where is it? Where's the Reels tab? E.

It's the second tap. Just click on the little... Oh, that at the bottom. Oh, boy. Okay. Oh, yeah, we're going to do it live. All right, this is great. All right.

So do you see in the top right a little icon? Yep. Wait, up top there, the hearts? With the hearts, yeah, yeah. Okay, click it. I love that we're doing this life. Your algorithm. Yes.

Does it know you? What does it say? It says, lately you've been into award show glamour. Sweat sessions and culinary indulgences. It's pretty good. What are sweat sessions? Sex. Yeah, what is that?

No. Like workouts. Workouts. I do get served a lot of workouts. We think you're into them. Her narrative self knows she's supposed to be working out more. So it's already servicing your narrative stuff. But you can see there's a list of.

Yeah, it says what you want to see more of. Based on your activities summarized by AI. Golden Globes, fashion, luxury, fashion fashion. Monica fashion. Apple podcast. Los Angeles food scene. Okay. Beauty, comedy, food, fitness, motivation.

Golden Gloves, pretty good. But now, let's say we were wrong. Let's see you're not in the sweat. You can actually press that and move that to the, I don't want to see this thing. What you want to see, Lesa? So you can get your hands in there and you can change it. Because also, sometimes we might be misreading a signal, like, you don't really want to see it, but you can't stop looking at it. Yes.

And another thing is, sometimes your interest can change. Like, this is a tragic example, but one that I have a friend who went through, which is she got pregnant, and she was going deep on the nesting thing. And her Instagram got all about all this baby gear. Tragically, she lost the pregnancy. Uh-huh. How horrible is it that she's opening up Instagram and we're pummeling her with baby stuff? Yes, yes. So that was one of the inspirations for this, which is she should be able to go in and be like,

nothing about nurseries. I like that. And so by allowing you to get in there and not only see what we think you're interested in, but you just tell us yes and no, that then hopefully allows people to express their second order preferences or the narrative self. Now, again, not anyone's going to do it. Right. But one way to learn about these things is just to ask. So we pick up on your interests, we learn from them and we adapt.

But we don't understand quite as literally as people think we do what you're interested in. For instance, we don't understand that that's a joke about race from a black comic. Right. It's not nuanced. The way it works is an approach we call embeddings. But basically, the way you can think about it is you can take any video and map it into a space. It's not two-dimensional, but imagine it's a giant two-dimensional map. There's no borders or boundaries or labels.

It's just a bunch of video. on a big board. Similar videos end up in similar places on the board. They concentrate in little areas. Yes, exactly. Because the way the technology works is similar things end up in similar places. And so then if you like one video,

whatever it is, we look and find videos near it in that space. Sure. And show you those videos. What allows us to do your algorithm work is now we can embed topics into the same map as the videos. And so we can be like, oh, okay, cool. Like you said you're into men's vintage fashion.

That's here. Let's find the videos near here. You said you don't want to see, you know, bikini videos. Yeah. That topic is here. It won't show you any videos that are near it over here. Right. So you're giving it a low side, basically.

Kind of, yeah. We couldn't do that effectively even two years ago. That's actually how a lot of ranking works is we're like, all right, you like this thing. What is similar to it? We'll show it to you. People think it's like, oh, you know I'm into service. And it's like two years ago, it would have just been this giant number. I wouldn't have been able to tell you what it means.

Now I can say, oh, that's pretty close to surfing. Uh-huh. Or to, like, skater culture or whatever it is. Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert. If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance.

That's smart. Not checking the pockets of your jeans before doing laundry. Classic oversight. That mystery. clunking in the dryer, yeah. That was your lip balm's final moments. And somehow, there's always one random receipt in there to dissolve into confetti. Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary, subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North America

Insurance Co. and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses, Monica, only used 20% of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the page is torn out. Yeah, or paying for a coffee that's one-fifth full. Yuck. Point is, you miss a lot unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped in emails, call logs, and transcripts, all that unstructured data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And when you get a full cup of coffee, you can do more too. But I digress.

visit hubspot.com today. I appreciate you reading your algorithm out loud by that. That took some bravery. Thank you. I didn't know it was coming. It's good. Is there a way to add? So I see you can drag, but can you like type in?

Whatever you want. Things that are getting you angry on a regular basis. Figure out what words are associated with that anger and block them out. That's called hidden words. Yeah, you can do that. You can do that for comments too and you can also do that for your messages. I like that one a lot. Yeah.

It's just people they like to be angry. This isn't your issue, but I don't see people wanting to get rid of that because they want it. I think it depends. So for politics specifically, this research is a bit out of date. We say research, it's usually surveys. We found that there was a small percentage of people who really wanted more politics. But most people were like, I kind of want to see less politics. That's, again, this tension between the narrative self and what was the other self?

Experiential self. Yeah. As they like saw it, they clicked to. on it, we think they like it, but they don't, their narrative self or their second order preference was like, I just need to breathe. They don't feel good. They know they don't feel good after. Yeah, and most people with these surveys were in that

bucket. There's a very loud, call it 5% or 10% of people, I forget what the number is specifically. So a meaningful minority but minority that are like all it. It also varies by platform. Like Threads has way more politics than Instagram does. Not because

it ranks for politics, but because you make these other decisions about how the app works. Threads is designed around back and forth conversation. That's better for debate. That's going to mean topics like politics are better served. And what I'd be right to say, threads is also encouraging you to share thoughts, not necessarily images. Yeah, I think Instagram is about sharing a creative object, visual creativity, videos, photos. Threads is about perspectives, your hot takes, and you're going to have a lot of takes on what's going on in politics. So the percentage of threads that is politics is way higher.

and the percentage of Instagram. That's concerning to me. I don't know that it's doing anyone in ego, but whatever, I don't get to decide. Okay, now let's talk about AI-generated content. Yes. It's a very uncontroversial. That I'm sure you have a perfect thing.

You really put yourself out in the fire. I'm impressed. Well, you've got to talk about these things. I would way rather that everything that is in your mind that you're worried about or that someone's watching is thinking about we talk about than to sweep anything underneath the rug. And I hope people have an appetite

too, we're not sure and we're doing the best we can to monitor it and see as it evolves. I hope there's some appetite for that and some latitude for that because that's the reality of how this is kind of unfolding. So I have a lot of questions about it. One is we should start by defining it, right? Because here's what's tricky. You were asked during this Bloomberg thing, could you label everything that was AI generated? That would be helpful for all of us.

And you're like, yes, we agree. We did that. And what we were doing is it'll read anything you do on Photoshop or Adobe as being AI generated. So it's like, where is this line? If someone uses some Photoshop to brush up a pimple on their face in the video, that's now AI. Where are we drawing the lines? So maybe we should just kind of define it. Like most complicated issues, the edges are much easier to define.

So there's clearly, you used a film camera and it took a light and those photons hit a piece of film. and you captured a moment and it's not perfect, but it's authentic capture of a moment in reality. And then there's, I went to some AI model and I came up with an idea

and I expressed that as words and then out came this crazy video of a hippo and a tutu doing a backflip. Yes. And that clearly never, ever happened. So that's purely synthetic content and then what I would call maybe captured content.

I actually think most contents in the middle. So with all of our phones today, when you capture, it's doing a lot of photo processing. Some of it's using AI, some of it's not. It's trying to make sure you are not wildly backlit. So if the sky's bright in front of you, it might use AI to brighten you up and darken the sky. So it looks more like you would perceive it as opposed to a film camera where you would never be able to see the person.

Yeah, AI is doing color correction like crazy. All sorts of stuff. Sometimes in some of the default cameras is doing skin smoothing. It's doing things that are a little bit more contentious. Really? There's lots of work to try to make sure lighting works properly for different skin colors, which is another interesting thing. Wow. That just happened to me.

I took a picture with a gal that was working at a restaurant in Detroit that I frequent. As she held it for the selfie and took the picture, I was like, I look 29 in this photo. And she looks much younger. I was like, oh, her go-to camera is this augmented. Oh, because it's like an app or something she uses? She only takes photos clearly through this app. I looked at it as it came on. I was like, well, that's neither of us.

But here we go. There's your picture. When you do portrait mode, it's recreating the boca effect you get from a shallow depth of field from a really wide open lens. And so then it's like, okay, well, if it's using this kind of model or this kind of AI model, what is AI an interesting question? If I'm doing a spot, clean up for like a pimple, it might be just literally copying pixels

or it might be using AI to generate pixels. Do we call that AI? And so I'm not trying to put my hands up in the air and say we can't do anything. I'm just saying the reality of the situation is it is a spectrum. Hard to define. Almost impossible. So there's that challenge. And then there's another challenge,

which is the models are getting so good that, like the work that we do now, and we do work to try to detect things that are automatically generated by AI, we'll get less and less effective over time as the models get better. Now, our models can get better too, but it's an arms race. And I actually think at this point we will continue that race, but it might be more practical to essentially mark things that were captured when they are captured by the camera with what's called like a fingerprint and verify that those were actually captured,

then verify that things were actually generated. It might be easier to identify what was actually captured by a camera by doing industry-wide solutions around some of these interesting technologies than to try and automatically detect what was created with an AI. So we're now exploring that. So then you could click on something

that you see on social media and it could be like, hey, this was signed by the Sony camera in a way that can't be replicated or forged by the AI. Will they be using like NFT technology to kind of create that? There's a couple different approaches out there. I'm forgetting the name of the one that Adobe's leaned into right now, is reading about theirs last week or the week before. But basically you work with manufacturers,

so whether it's Apple or Google or Samsung or Sony or Canon or whatever, and they actually put, think of it as like a signature in the file that can't be replicated. Is there a way to just require that whoever creates the content? So instead of you guys having to go in and decipher that it's like illegal, if you create something from AI to not say, like the onus is on the creator, not on you guys. Ads are like that, right? Where you have to say this is an ad. Yes, but then the challenge is enforcement.

Yeah, you have to police it, which puts them in the situation that they're currently in. So, like, ads is a good example. So in the U.S., there is no law that says you have to mark something as an ad if it's an ad. In Germany, you do. So in Germany, you'll see a lot of creators will just put ad on everything because they're worried if they unintentionally there's like a liquid death water in the background, they're going to get in trouble. And then the question is, how does the government police it? Because you said illegal. Now, if we had a rule, let's say you have to mark it as AI, the rule doesn't matter unless we

enforce it. Back to this traffic flight, sort of analogy from before. So to enforce it, we need to be able to detect it on our own and say, hey, you didn't label this. And then again, what percentage are we going to let slide? Is it 8% synthetic? Is it 12% synthetic? When do we enforce? Am I writing a ticket for 5 over or 15 over? I want to give people context to make more informed decisions. So we could maybe show you how likely we think it is to be AI. We don't know for sure, but we think there's a 70% chance. Or we could show you, oh, this was actually signed. So we know this was actually captured because it's signed by this industry standard. I think we better for us to adopt a standard than build her own that works across the whole industry. Because

obviously people spend a lot of time on a lot of social networks, not just Instagram. My bias is to not avoid the work, but to do the work that is going to be robust over the long run and then give people information to decide what they want to trust or not. But again, in the same Bloomberg interview, you said something I think is very profound. And again, I think people in general want everyone else to do the work that's also their work, whether that's your kid's not doing well in schools. It's the teacher's fault, but you've not done one bit of homework with your kid. Everyone's always off. The homework fights are hard. Yes. But you said what you do with your own boys. There is some personal responsibility, which is we're maybe not asking the right.

question. The question we're asking is, is this AI or not? And a better framing of it for your own children, what you tell to your children is, is to ask them who created it, what their incentives are, and what they're after. You have to identify that because that's really how you're going to figure all this out. I think that's what digital literacy is going to become for our kids is in a world where anybody can create something that looks real, sure, you can be like, does it have a signature or not? Is it like generated by AI or not? but it's still going to become much more important to consider who said it and why they might have said it. And that is something that historically isn't how we think, not just online but offline, right?

We just kind of evaluate what we see based on exactly that, what we see. Exactly. Well, we believe our eyes. Yeah. Yes, and of course we get into the vast spectrum of skepticism that people inherently have. What's funny is we want to not have to do on this platform, what we do in real life, which is you're telling me you need $20 because you need a bus ticket back to wherever because you're kids. So I'm evaluating. Am I getting scammed right now? Is this person genuinely trying to get home or are they trying to go get Mad Dog 2020?

I have to try to figure that out. And I have to do my best to assess their intention. And we're doing it all the time in all of our interpersonal relationships. Yeah. If a guy's selling you something, you've got to consider the fact, well, they're a salesman who gets paid on units moved. I must keep that in mind when I'm evaluating how effective this product is or not. And we're going to just have to do that with the content we see. Yeah.

And then our role, I think, is going to be to give you and make more prominent, because some of this already exists, but it's too hard to get to, more information. This account is based in this country. It was created two days ago or 20 years ago or, in our case, 15 years ago. You use yourself in a same example. Yeah, yeah. So you could be like, okay, Adam, this account is based in the U.S. It has had no username changes ever. You know, it's been registered for, call it, 13, 14 years. This is reputation. Yeah, exactly. And then we could add other things. Like, this post was recorded with the Sony camera,

authenticated by Sony, or this post was created with AI. That might not mean it's a bad post. Then you just know. I like, when you said, and I guess this is probably forthcoming, I would be so supportive of this, is your biases. So you are left leaning. You are right leaning. You mentioned financial bias, which is incredibly pertinent. But then there's even other things over time. I mean, we're talking about step two, now three, four, five. I think it would be interesting to be like, okay, well, this meme or this narrative,

where did it come from? Who was the first person who posted about this? That's interesting, not just from a safety perspective, but from a, the value should go to the original creative perspective. Creatives, right? On one hand, it could be like, okay, this is a lie, who started it. But another one could be like, this is an amazing dance or bit, who came up with it first? There are all sorts of really interesting things that we can do under this umbrella of surfacing information about what you're seeing

so that you can not just decide whether or not to trust it, but decide what it means. I can tell you the one that scared me. I saw, and this was a breakdown, thank God, someone exposed this, but this video that had gone very, very viral. It was a New York City police officer confronting ICE agents saying, you don't have to be. jurisdiction in this city. I too am upholding the Constitution. It was compelling. It was inspiring. You wanted to take action when you saw it. And it was millions and millions and millions of forwards. And someone had the wherewithal to zoom in on the badge on the shoulder of the cop. And it's not real writing. But I'm telling you, I think I'm quite good at seeing this stuff as probably all of us

think the literacy competency illusion. Yeah, we're not good at it. And I was like, oh, now this is This is what's really fucking dangerous. This is like a super inspirational video that could make you leave your house and go react to something that didn't happen. And it was designed to be. It's not a coincidence that thing was sent around. It was designed to be sent around. It was designed to invoke a specific emotion. And I just think, man, when you start having people responding to atrocities that haven't even happened, that's the scary part, I think.

There's tons of things that are concerning and there's tons of things that are exciting. technologies has continued to change more and more quickly and we're just accelerating a lot right now this has been happening as a trend for a long time but this last year or two in this next couple years is a real inflection point in the speed at which technology is changing and there are lots of things to be excited about

and there's lots of things to be concerned about and our job as platforms like Instagram is to consider both in what way can AI give people superpowers make you help you remember everything process immense amounts of information, produce more, be more creative, get people who weren't creative to be creative in the first place. But also, how can it be abused?

Where do we have to make sure we're giving people more context that we didn't think about having to give people just a year or two ago? Where do we have to be more careful about how it's going to be misused and then get ahead of that and prevent those misuses from happening in the first place? When invariably something happens that we didn't plan on, that's bad, how can we react quickly? It's just the two sides. The stressful fucking job you've taken out.

Yeah, very. It is amazing. It is very stressful and it's also really amazing. Yes, yes, like the product itself. It's not lost on me. What's like your personal high from the job? I get to meet amazing people, which for me is really energizing for two reasons. One, I love people. I'm an extrovert. But two, I'm really curious about different industries.

I get to go talk to a bunch of different podcasters about how their world works. How does the business work? How does the creative process work? I get to do the same thing in fashion. I get to do the same thing with European footballers. You're just exposed to everyone. I'm lucky enough that I get to talk to people who are amazing in all these different worlds and all these different countries. We have the same upside of the same job upside. Yeah, literally.

That's like identical. Yeah, yeah. That's one of my favorite perks of this. Yeah, I keep walking around. It's like, it's impossible the amount of people we've got to meet in this one lifetime. Yeah. Yeah. And you get to really talk to them.

Yes. In a world where not last than me, we have been part of most of my life. moving the world to shorter and shorter bits of information that are consumed, you all are part of this sort of almost counter trend, which is like, no, we're just going to talk for an hour or two. Yeah. And we're going to go deep. Yeah, yeah.

And people want that. I get nervous because even with what we do, so much has changed in the past eight years since when we started, where they knew, like, they would come and you'd have to listen for the whole thing or for most of it. But now clips are such a huge part of doing podcasts. and I do worry. I'm like, oh, no, it's just back to the thing

that we were escaping, which is late night. The antidote. Yeah, literally we were like... To the 140 characters. Yeah, and the five-minute fun clip on late night, which we love, but the whole point is to have, like, a real conversation. And now it feels like we're almost reverting back to that.

I think what's key, and you should tell me if I'm off base here, because this is not your world, not mine, is to not conflate what I see is more of the marketing for the conversation and then the actual conversation. and then the actual conversation. And there might be way more views of the short clips on YouTube and Instagram and elsewhere. But the core of the business, I think, is still the long form,

both from a, like, who do you have the deepest connection with as a creative, but also from the business perspective. Yeah, the real estate to sell is on the long form. Exactly. But that's what's a bummer, I think sometimes, where I'm like, oh, my God. I mean, I ask so many people, I'm like, oh, do you listen to that? Or let's say they say something about Good Hang. And I'm like, oh, do you listen?

They're like, I saw clips. I mean, I saw clips is so common. Totally. And there will be more people who see clips than listen to the whole thing. But if you're growing the loop of people who listen to the whole thing, by having 10 times as many people do clips, you're still growing your core base. I know. It's just hard to compete.

But if that's shrinking, then it's concerned. Right. Yeah, I don't have that fear. I don't think we're losing listeners to clips. I think we're getting exposed to more people who don't do two-hour shows personally. The thing I also like about your world is you get to participate with just audio. Obviously, videos become a big deal. This is why this place is so beautiful.

But I listen to you guys when I'm on the way to work, when I'm in the car, when I'm working out. I can't do that with Instagram. I can't do that with clips and videos. And so you get to participate in parts of people's lives that things and products and the apps like Instagram don't. I agree. That's what I love about it. but I worry that it is changing and moving more into, because our attentions are much shorter,

that it's like, oh, I got the gist. It's a real word. I think people underappreciate audio in general, like my whole industry does. Like, I've been trying to push it a little bit, which is most times spend on Instagram is watching videos now. That is half audio, right?

Right. Yeah. But we're not thinking about that experience as much. What does Instagram sound like is an interesting question? Because the visual component has just gotten better and better and better and the audio experience is really not.

And we tend to, I think, think more about what we see than what we hear. But what we hear, I think, can have just as strong and emotional impact. Yeah. Another thing that I was sympathetic to is, first of all, I think it might shock people to learn. And you do this great example. When you have a crowd of people, it's very easy to demonstrate the reality of this. Because when you first say to it, you almost don't believe it. But tell us where people spend time on Instagram.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Because you have basically four options, right? You have the feed. You have reels. You have DMs. Maybe is there three? Stories. And stories.

There is a big one. Right. So you've got these four columns. And also just start maybe at the beginning what it was and where we're at now. People my age, I'm in my 40s. They think of Instagram almost always as a feed of square photos because that's what Instagram was when Instagram launched. But if you look at how people spend their time and even more, if you look at what people do, it's just not the core part of Instagram anymore. People share way more to stories than they do to feed.

People, particularly young people spend way more time in stories than they do in feed. But the thing that people do the most, particularly young people, is actually message as DM. Teens will often, and young people will spend more time even in DMs than in some of these other surfaces, and they definitely share way more. And forget about all the text. If you just look at photos and videos sent, there's way more photos and videos sent as DMs than there are posted to stories or feed or even those two combined at this point. Yeah, you ask everyone in the room, like, put your hand up if you've sent a DM on Instagram in the last day. And 90% of the room puts their hand up. Great.

And I'll keep your hand up if you have. If you posted a story. I actually did this just this one time of Bloomberg? I made it up. I was like, did you open up Instagram today? Did you send a DM today? Did you post a story today? And it's like a bunch of hands went down.

Did you post a feed post today? And it was like... Everybody has... It was like two people. Feed post today. I did. Yeah. Well, we did because we have a schedule.

Yeah, that's right. But when you did it that way, it really sank in. And then what I appreciated was you being honest about the fact that we have that data, right? So had we only stuck with feed? And we said, no, we're feed only. I wouldn't be on this stage today. We wouldn't be relevant because we see what people want to do. And they would have gone to a place where they could have done that.

And that's just the hard facts of the business. And so what I thought about is we've had very few changes. we went from audio to video and people lost their fucking mind. Yeah. And then the other crazy thing was we had you could do it a week early if you joined the subscription.

People lost their mind. Also, when we first went to Spotify, people really freaked out. Yeah, but all to say, we've only had three or four changes in eight years and it was very difficult and people were very, very... It's stressful.

Angry. And so I was thinking, like, how you're weathering the outrage. And also, Also the frustration, despite what everyone's saying, once they get over the hurdle, they like it. This challenge of change management was my first exposure to sort of controversy in the industry where, you know, I was the designer on a new design of the home page of Facebook in late 2008, early 2009. And like, people lost their mind.

I was reading the comments, it was gnarly. Death threats. And I'm like 25. Yeah. And again, my self-worth is totally tied up in my work. You're nothing if you're not that. Yeah, and I'm just getting pumped. Yeah.

You ruined it. Yeah, I was just devastated. You learned to accept the fact that, look, if you're going to spend half an hour and hour using our product today, the analogy I used to use is like it's a desk. You wrote some letters, you organized some photos, you did some things. And I just came in, I just rearranged your desk. Yeah. You're going to tell me to F off because.

I didn't ask the permission. And you think of it as your desk. But the alternative is to become irrelevant. And I don't think that's being bombastic. I'll give Mark a lot of credit on this. Marks always said that companies usually fail by hitting their goals all the way down. That's about not really defining success properly

and also not being willing to make hard decisions. In that case, it's about aiming high. But in this case, it's about being willing to actually do things differently. And I would rather lead Instagram, during however long I lead it for, through a bunch of changes, and occasionally go too fast, too far,

and get backlash, then have it become irrelevant under my watch. Yeah, that's weird. This is relevant because my phone updated last night. Do you have the new update? I've been rejecting that. I hate it so. I was like, I'm in a bad mood today.

Like, I can't figure out how to use it. I don't like the way it looks. I'm so mad. We've pushed too far. We've made mistakes. We've experienced a fair share of, slaps for it. We're trying something now that's different that I don't know if it's going to

work or not, but we are trying a version of Instagram that is basically you open it up and it's just stories and then you swipe straight into reels. If and when we launch it, there's going to be all of the energy. You should be going to Tahiti for a two weeks. So there'll be no grid post at all?

No, no, you can swipe through them too. You'd have to select to be on the feed? The feed would just be more video. It'll still support photos, but it'll be full screen one at a time. Oh, insert. How you consume video mostly. And the Reels tab and shorts on YouTube and all of it. Yeah, that scares me.

I know. I don't want you to do that. Yeah, so I don't know if it's going to work. When we try new things, we have to be ready to answer questions because people see it. So right now we are allowing people, not everybody, but we're allowing people in India to opt in. The idea is to manage this if it's successful over a year or even two and keep making the experience better and better. And then see how many people opt in. and of the people who do switch, how many people keep it?

Right. And then when we get to a place where, let's say, the majority of people switch and the majority of them actually also keep it, then we can consider moving everybody else over. That creates a really healthy incentive for us to make it something people want to switch to, but it also takes a long time. It's a trial.

So we're trying it out. Is there a way to mass DM? Is there a way to get people to sign up or something where we DM them? Channels. You can create a channel, which is basically a broadcast DM, where people can sign up. It's basically like a group chat,

but instead of having every armchair in a group chat, you can just message all of them, and then they can reply to your messages so you can kind of consume it. But it's not creating a message board. No, it's just in DMs. I think we should do that and start sending out the episode. Yeah, it's not for...

So you know understand about that is the number of people who will sign up for that is much smaller than the people who are going to follow your account. So it's for your most passionate people. And so the content strategy should match that. Okay, so great. That brings up, it was my grievance the first time we spoke with you, and it continues to be my grievance,

and I need to understand the rationale behind it. Please. Why can I put a link in stories, and I can't put a link anywhere else? Yeah, we hate that. Why the fuck can't I put a link in my feed? It's contentious. I get this one every week.

Might be time to buckle. Yeah, well, you know, I have buckled before. If we do links for everybody everywhere, I think what will happen is there will be a lot of links posted very quickly and it'll change how Instagram feels significantly and I don't think it'll be for the better. One, you get a lot more scam and spam. Links are the vector for all of that. You get a lot more politics and you get a lot more news because they usually are link and text oriented as opposed to photo and video oriented.

And I think we become less differentiated from other platforms like Facebook. and I want us to be about creativity. And I think specifically Instagram is about visual creativity. And I think when we do links, we've become more about news and publishers and politics and less about fashion and art and film. And so that's the reason. I don't expect that to be remotely satisfying. Satisfying.

But that is the reason. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Okay, another quick thing I wanted to ask you about is I watch a lot of your two camera posts. And they are generally bits of advice for creators. Oh, my video. Yeah, yeah, yours. Your comfort level of speaking directly to the lens is outstanding. The fact that you're not in show business is incredible because I suffer from that.

And you get right on that motherfucker and talk directly to lens all the time. And you're giving tips to creators. And I was curious, do you have a distinction in your mind between the occasional poster who puts, it's food or their vacation photos up versus someone who's making content. Yes. What would we call the two groups? There's creators and then what? Just average folk.

Users. And what percentage is on the platform? Do you have any sense of that? I mean, depends on how you define it, but they're definitely, it's at the very least tens of millions of creators. And there's over three billion people who use Instagram. So it's a tiny minority. Yeah.

But my hunch is, because you're servicing them so much, are they the lifeblood of the platform? They are very valuable for the platform. I think that creators, well, a couple of things. One, we define creators as individuals or groups of people, so not like a company or corporation or brand, that produce original content with the intent to grow. You know, you're trying to get something done. Maybe you're trying to evangelize a cause.

Maybe you're trying to get elected. Maybe you're trying to sell some shoes, but there's an intent there to grow. So if you're just posting pictures of your vacations or the occasional hobby, that's cool, but we don't think of you as a creator. Yeah. You can be creative. That's great.

But I believe, and we believe, I should say, that power has been shifting from institutions to individuals across industries for years, and we should be leaning into that. Athletes are much more relevant relative to the teams that they play for compared to, like, 10, 20, 30 years ago. Or the fact that these college kids are now incredibly well paid all through that. Yeah. Journalists are building their own brands outside of the publications that they work for. You'll see actors have their Instagrams explode when the new never. flick show gets announced even before it drops. And I think this is because we want to understand the world through the eyes of people, people we admire or trust or look up to. And that's what

creators are. And so we think that we should lean in there because that's what people are most interested in. That's who's going to become more and more important over time. This is so obvious, but I didn't think of it until you said it out loud, which is you said, I think it's useful occasionally to pull all the way back and look at the very big picture, which is what the internet, the first iteration gave rise to, is prior to the internet, people could not self-publish. The expense was too high, or there were institutions that controlled that. And so the first wave of the internet was really allowing every human to be a publisher. And that's like a big, big concept.

And it's been great and fucked this up because not everyone should be publishing. And we're hearing from a lot of people that we wouldn't have otherwise, and they're very helpful. We've given a lot of power to everybody. Yes. very democratized. Everyone's democratization of everything. Well, this is what it looks like. Yeah. And now the second wave is really producers, productions. So before studios only could afford the Aeroflex camera that was $250,000. And the film you put in it, that was $35,000 in the processing and all the stuff that went into creating content. It was impossible for someone to do it.

That's been changing, but AI is really now the insane breakthrough where it's like your environment could be any location. So what we're now doing is democratizing production, which is a fascinating thought. Yeah. My hope is that the way we participate in this wave will empower human creativity. I think that there's versions of AI

that will disintermediate people and displace people and jobs, but there's also versions of AI that can give creative people the ability to do more of what they do so well and to be more successful. And so my hope is that on Instagram, the ways that we lean into AI

with creative tools and assistance and the ability to understand your insights or to understand the patterns for what works and what doesn't or to recreate or create whatever is in your imagination will be really empowering. But it's the same construct. The internet allowed anybody to publish and reach an audience

because the cost of distributing things went almost to zero. And AI is going to make the cost of producing things go way, way down as well. And so you will just see more content. Yeah. Our job is to figure out the right way and the responsible way to manage one of the platforms.

And I'm hoping that we can really empower human creativity and how we lean into that. But that's the big question for us over the next couple of years. Okay, now, how have you evolved in terms of monetizing the work of those creators? And how is Instagram generating money for these creators? and how does it compare to say a creator on YouTube? So what creators do, and they're not the only people do this, is they make content, people consume that content,

and then we sell ads, obviously, between pieces of content. You could think of it as selling ads against that sort of attention. It's really the old network television model. You get this free show Seinfeld, and you're going to watch a Clorox commercial. Exactly. Now, YouTube has historically been more focused on long-form video, and they show ads before and during the video,

and then they give creators a cut. our videos are shorter so we don't put ads before. You don't get a pre-roll on Instagram, which is like, you know, you have to watch this, and you don't get ads in the middle of the videos. So there's one challenge, which is who deserves the credit. Yeah. YouTube is the best in the industry at creator payouts, I think. It means specifically paying creators directly because the platform can pay them,

the fans can pay them, or brands can pay them. In terms of the platform paying them, YouTube does the best. Now, what we've done is we've got tests currently in the U.S., India, Japan and Korea at different times we've tried to pay creators for creating content. And what we keep finding, particularly with videos, if we pay creators, we're like, hey, if you make this number of posts, we'll pay you this number of dollars.

They do create more posts, but the incremental posts that they make are not as good, and they don't hit that many more. So they actually don't drive up the amount of time people use Instagram that much. I was going to say there's really no metric you can decide on that it's not going to obscure the output because it could either be a number of posts

or it could be total views. Well, now total views I'm incentivized to be provocative. I'm incentivized to be what the algorithm was on YouTube. But even if you ignore those challenges, all the tests we have are just burning money. If we invest $10 million in a bonus program, we've never made anywhere near $10 million back. I'd be happy just to break even. Sure, sure, sure, sure. For me, if we could have this program break even, have the eligibility be clear.

So it's obvious how you get to be part of it because it can't feel like a loto. And ideally the payouts aren't embarrassing. then it's a success. People create so much content on their own and the incremental content that people create when we pay them is not that high in quality or quantity on average. I'm sure some people are doing amazing things

that we end up burning most of the money. We're a business, I want to be honest about that. We're not just going to burn the money. So we'll continue iterating because that could change or trying, I should say, but we focus more now on the other ways we can help creators make a living. How can we help with fans paying you directly?

But I was going to say, you have a Patreon-ish version existing, right? You have subscriptions, which is actually quietly growing and doing well, where if you have a platform where people are willing to pay for your content, you can do that on Instagram, you can set the price. I think we just cover the cost of running it. We don't actually make money off that. And then the big one, though, is getting paid by brands. Last I checked was years ago,

it seemed like it was more than a $15 billion industry a year, which is creators making deals off platform and getting paid by companies to advertise. their products. To do a post about a pair of sneakers. Yeah. So we've tried to support that. So we have the creator marketplace where you can have brands and creators find each other and sets each other out. We have

ads tools where the ads can then use that creative and run ads with that same creative, with their creator's permission. It's like a system that integrates that perfectly into their... So that the advertiser can find out the value that they're getting from actually paying for this content. We want creators to get paid, but we can't just burn money running checks.

So we're trying to find the balance. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So interesting. We're going to do a hard pivot. I can feel it. You make a prediction, dangerously, perhaps. But your 2026 prediction was, looking forward to 2026, one significant interesting is that authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.

Yeah, this is a real tension. Tell me about this statement. I think I understand about it, but I'm not sure. It's abstract enough that you could deny any implications of the statement. In legal terms, this is like real messy language. like real messy language. I wrote that thing and I was like, I should write more. I wrote this

thing and it was like really boring. And then I was like, all right, I should make it less boring. And then I rewrote it and I was like, now it's just purposely controversial. That's annoying. That's just as boring, just different. And then it's like, all right, I should just cut half of the stuff that I don't have any business weighing in on anyway and I'll focus on the things that I care most about. So I don't know how it turned out, but you read it

so that's cool. Maybe you had to as your homework for this thing. People think of Instagram's aesthetic, particularly people in my age, as these perfect photos, sunsets, skin smoothing, makeup, this whole thing. That is not what is in the cultural zeit guys today. What works, even on Instagram, is content that is kind of very purposely counter to that polished aesthetic. Messy. Messy. Messy, raw, pimples, blurry, not cropped properly, real. Because people just want a little of authenticity in this world where we're inundated

with processed, intense information. So I think that there's this interesting thing now where that perfect aesthetic is becoming cheap because it's easy to produce. And so the most savvy creatives across a lot of industries are kind of rebelling against that, not atypical of what happens in different artwork. Well, as any person in a business, you're looking for a hole in the market and you're trying to fill it. So if everything is perfect and polished, what's available to exploit is this. So we're in this moment now, and I don't know how long it'll last, where imperfections are a indication of authenticity. That's one of the reasons why they're working. They're also relatable. And so it's a way of being like, I'm not

AI, or I'm not a brand who's trying to sell you something. I'm just a person. Yeah, a fucked up mess. Yeah, you know, I curse, I stutter over my words, I make mistakes, just like everybody else. So that's kind of where we are, and you're already starting to see it. AI's going to figure that out, right? It's already recreating it. Like, if you talk to chat GPT, you hear it take a breath. It doesn't need to breathe. That's not a thing. And so you're going to be able to create the illusion of that raw imperfections. Yeah. It gets to starting now.

Adam, I called the front desk of the hotel I was staying at in Detroit. Busy, busy, busy, busy. Then I went online and got the actual hard number to the place and called on my phone. Yeah, landline style. It was like, hello, thank you for calling such and such hotel and blah, blah, blah.

And it had a bunch of imperfections in the thing. And I was talking for a while. I don't know what clued me in, but I go, hold on, are you a computer? And she's like, I could see why you would ask that. And I was like, oh, yeah. Fuck, dude. This is nuts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a thing. It's insane. Yeah, yeah. I talked for a while before I figured out it was a computer. I know. But in that world, what's left, I think it's our taste. It's our perspective.

It's our opinions that are going to be the thing that makes some piece of content be interesting or not. But the other question for me is how can you point the technology at what you want to get done? One way to think about it is like it is an it, it is an algorithm, it is AI, and it is coming for you. There's another way which is like, all right, it's a bunch of tools. It doesn't care about me. It's agnostic. But what are the things that I want to do that it can help me do more of better, faster, stronger, et cetera. And then how do I figure out how to do that?

Because it's interesting tension. On one hand, it's so technical, right? Like you're talking about these giant foundation models and these data centers with all of these GPUs. Anybody listen to this is already like, I don't care what you said. So on one side, it's so technical. On the other side, it makes things so much more approachable. Like I said before, I'm not created anything. I used to program.

I used to write a lot of code. Really bad code. There'll be some engineers now who will go look up my diffs. Just if they need to throw up. Just to make fun of me. They eat some poison. It was just like rage. Just dunk on me on internal forms.

I can code again now because I can work with an AI to program and I can speak to it in English. Wow, yeah. Because I'm technical enough. I can give it pretty good direction. But it's getting easier and easier. And so a couple months ago, I started programming, and I was like, all right, this will be fun. I haven't done this in forever, both my own stuff, but also at work.

And the way you did it is you basically had an AI, you talked to and you watched a program. That's not how people do it. Well, some people do it, but it's not how I do it now. It's not how a lot of people do it. Now, I've got like four of them. That's like four engineers, basically, and I talk to each one of them. See who does it better? No, I just check back.

I do four things in parallel or I do two things and see who does it better. It's a completely different way of exercising your brain. I'm multitasking aggressively. I've got like four really junior employees that I talk to every 10 minutes. Without any civilities. I actually do. I say, please.

Me too. I know. It's so weird. And I heard that it's wasting X amount of money. It is. I'm sure it's like burning water. Yeah. But like I do this because I always said please

and thank you to Alexa because my kids, I don't want to hear me barking orders at any personality. Yeah, yeah. And so it's definitely gotten into my program. It is. Like, why am I being so? Like, I'm sorry. I gave you the wrong instructions

the last time. It's like, why would be able to do that? I know. Just be accountable to the computer. It's so ridiculous. But I don't think it's limited to programming. I think it's going to make technical things, not just programming,

more approachable to a bunch of people, because it can bridge. And that's an interesting tension that I'm not sure I know how to make sense of yet. Okay, my last thing is thread. So we were on this trip, and I was like, what is thread? You're telling me about threads.

So it's Twitter? I don't know. What are you doing? And I want to say at that time, I was trying to remember, because I said it so often. I think you had 300 million subscribers at that time. Is that possible?

About 300 million users, yeah. Every morning I'd ask where we were at and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The goal was to create a place for, like, the healthy exchange of perspectives of ideas. It started really in reaction to Twitter. We didn't want to be like a kumbaya, super friendly Twitter. People are going to argue, I don't want to pretend otherwise.

But we just wanted it to be more open for more types of perspectives, more ideas, a bit more civil. Over the time, it's evolved, though, and now it's much more focused on trying to support communities, trying to support just the open exchange of ideas. It's growing. We're doing pretty well here in the U.S. We're crushing right now in Japan, which is interesting. You're doing a great job of integrating it into Instagram because I see headlines I can't resist,

but click on in open threads. That's our equivalent of clips. We showed little bits of threads in Instagram that raise awareness. And I go. Yeah, and so we look at two things. We look at how many people use threads or see threads because of its Instagram integration, and then we look at how many people just go on their own. Right.

And that go on their own is the core business, and there are more people who go because of the... Yeah, you still haven't gotten me to go directly to threats. And we might not ever. Who knows? We haven't even gotten my wife to install it. Well, we're on threads if our listeners want to follow us. Yeah. It's follow.

Yeah, follow us. What is your evaluation of the X? Twitter platform. I don't want to underestimate them. I mean, they've gone through a lot of change. Have they grown, shrank, plateaued? What have they done? It's hard to say.

Somewhere between plateaued and shrunk a little. But maybe they're growing in some countries and shrinking others. That's pretty normal for social networks. They obviously laid off, I think, over 90% of their employees. That's kind of scary. It's also impressive. It's very efficient.

They've got some good people over there. I just want us to beat them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's honest and fair. Yeah. Like that. As I'm watching the Iran stuff, and I'm learning, they've shut off all the social media

and they've shut off even WhatsApp there. We got blocked partially there years ago. We were actually really big in Iran. The government there will block certain social media networks, certain websites, and then they'll shut the whole internet down at times. I wanted to ask just a stupid question. How did they mechanically decide what's on the internet? To me, the internet seems like this huge pipeline

that you pull different addresses. Yeah, yeah. How do they do it? How did they shut off just some parts of the internet? They work with the internet service providers to block specific domains. So you don't use Instagram by going to Instagram.com, most likely. But behind the scenes, there is an address. It might be a number.

It might be words somewhere. My app goes to there. Your app goes to there to talk to the servers. And so they'll have the people who provide internet block specific addresses. And then you can play this game of cat and mouse, where you can switch your addresses or you can go through a VPN. And what about Starlink? How does that factor in? Obviously, there's no control over Starlink.

If you somehow have Starlink, you do have access to everything, yeah? Yeah, straight from space. Okay. Crazy. It's the future. It's more than half the satellites in orbit. It's crazy. The last two things, I pride myself and being able to look at someone and say the exact car that they should always.

Yeah, you were right. And I spent this time, Monica, with Adam, and I said, I'm just going to say it, man. You need a 70s BMW 3.0. I just need to know what availed you to that advice, because you went on a search. I went on a hunt for a lot of time on bringat trailer.com. I don't know. I've never been a car guy. Like, I drive around a Toyota Sienna.

Also, like, you can't be like a tech exec and a Porsche. It's like too much of a... Yeah, stereotype. It's just too much of a cliche. I'm saying that a lot as I'm thinking of friends of mine. I apologize to say this on the record. Well, you use cliche. That was nice.

I used douchey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was like trying to find something that would give me some pleasure that wasn't like crazy. But there also was a little bit if you know you know. I drive that thing around. Most people don't even look. But every once in a while, someone is like, oh man, check out 39. And they come over and they want to talk.

Wow. What color is it? It's a fjord blue. It's like this blue. It's a little bit of a cult. It's a little bit of a cult pink color from the early 70s. I had said too blue would be my pick for you. That's my favorite.

It's blue all the way through. It's blue on the inside and blue on the outside. and go on the outside. It's tiny. It's like a gentleman's scoop. Yeah. It's very art deco-y. There's a mix of steel.

I love that car. So I should think you brought that. I never would have bought it. I would have been just driving the Sienna around. Do your boys like it? Yeah, particularly Blaze. He calls it the blueberry. He calls it blueberry.

Okay. And then the last thing I find so charming about you is you are a hardcore burning man person. What do you call yourselves burners or something? In a past life. What do you mean in a past life? I have kids now. I haven't gotten used. years. When's the last time you win?

I don't know, but I've been more times than I can count, so you're not wrong. Adam's the type that goes, Monica, a week before, and fucking builds the enormous contraptions. The build is for me the most fun part. You go and you're like building your camp, you're really making a city in the middle of the desert. By the end of the week, it's like chaos and it gets a little bit too messy from me. I'm getting old. But to get out there and to be using your hands, we built these yurts, which is what we sleep in, or these giant trapeze tents, which is what we hang in or the kitchen. Wow.

There's a C. We build a shower. Oh my God. And then you rip it all down. It's a lot of work. Yeah. But in this world where I'm on glowing rectangles all day, it's kind of nice to be outside with no internet in the desert, with your hands all dirty.

And fabricating. Yeah. Well, Adam, I adore you. You'll be back. Yeah, yeah. That was round two. We'll do round three. We'll be laughing at our naivete in this conversation.

That's right. It will all be irrelevant. In fact, the conversation will happen with our avatars. I believe in even great news. All right, well, thanks for coming. This was a blast. Thanks for having it. It's so much fun.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. Excuse me, I'm just sorting my sides here. I just did a little bit of acting a second ago. And how do you feel like you did, sir? Well, it was a cold read. It was my first time reading any of it. Sure. You know, it was a scene with my friend Monica.

Yeah. Yeah. Looks like she might be doing this role. So we had to do a little self-tape. Oh, my God. Oh. I hope that doesn't happen when I'm on set. Oh, my God. I'm glad this happened after the audition. Yeah, I just put myself on tape for something, which is fun.

Now, did it make you think you want to act with me someday? First of all, I have acted with you. Oh, yeah. Bless this mess. Bless this mess. Chips, I'm just outside the window. You're outside the window, but you weren't in a scene with me. Just pain you.

You're right. But definitely bless this mess. Yeah, bless this mess. You were very upset. You're hot. Yeah, it was easy. It was really easy for me to get into character for that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was fun. I forgot about that. Like a duck to water. Yes. Okay, I had forgot to say this on the last fact check, but I'd like to say it here. One thing I left out about my trip to Florida was that I had the time finally to binge Best Dead.

Mm-hmm. And I just want to give a testimonial. Most importantly, the first eight episodes, completely entertaining. I'm entertained. It's sleuthy. It's wheddenity. We get an expert.

Yeah. Just top-notch entertainment. Thank you. Yes. Extremely interesting. Interesting. And then I started episode nine right as I was taking off into the skies, leaving Miami. Yeah.

And I know, so you just said you don't like when I cry, but. No, I do. That I'm insincere. What did you say? No, no. Do you think I'm exploiting it or something? No, I know it's all true to you. And it's all, and I want you to cry because it's not good for you to build that up, like parts.

Yeah. But because you never did and now you do every day, this is also happening simultaneously this is happening with Jess. Okay. I think it's an older male thing. I think it is. Yeah, I think we've been holding it in for a very long time. Yeah. And then as all other muscles are atrophine, whatever holds in those tears, they are failing to.

I know. And I think it's very sweet. I'm just around a lot of men who are crying. Yeah. And sometimes I'm like, wow, do you mean it? Like, but of course you mean it. That's what you said last time too, I know. I, of course you mean it, but it's, it's just, it's so weird to be around someone for so long who's

who you never see do it, that it takes so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and then now it's like, it's like drop of the hat, DOTH. Well, it's not drop of the hat. They're very, they're very specific categories that get me. You're right. They're pretty predictable. It's not like someone says, like, I just had my first baby and I'm weeping.

That's like, you know, no one says like, like, I lost. I lost my aunt and I start weeping. No, yeah, no. There's just like there's categories that I'm now defenseless against. Yeah, of course. It makes sense. It makes sense. To hear someone be totally accountable for their bad behavior.

Yeah. I find so moving. Yeah. It's like, it's impossibly moving. So as that's happening, I'm also a little self-conscious because I'm sitting next to a dude who right when we got, I sat down, he wanted to bond over the fact that we had the same watch. Oh.

Which I was cool and I gave that some time. But all that let me know is like he is aware of me. It's not like an invisible object sitting next to him, which is often the case when you fly. Sure. He's aware of me. Yeah. So I got.

I've got my head on being observed, I think. And then so I have my headphones on and it starts getting, it starts getting me. And then I start welling up. And then there is a point in that episode nine where. Now just tears are just streaming down my face. I'm not like audibly doing anything. I just have my eyes closed. I have my headphones on.

And I'm hoping the dude's not looking at me. And also maybe it doesn't matter. There's nothing I can do about it. And it was just so moving. I was so moved by it. In a very similar way that that episode we've talked about for years, blame from Radio Lab. Yeah.

Very moved by it. Then there's some score. Andy, shout out Andy. And then there's a reaction. from Elizabeth that then now I now I audibly I do the thing where I start kind of laughing because I'm clearly crying crying now. But anyways, I just was really, really, really blown away with that. And I thought ultimately this entertaining thing that was just entertaining for me became very, very poignant and a wonderful display of why it's worth finding out everyone's point of view in all

situations. So it was great. I just wanted to encourage people to listen to it. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Obviously means a lot to me that you liked it. Oh, so and then I can answer without any, without any spoilers. I guess there's debate. You've since brought me up to speed that there's debate. I a thousand percent believe this person. Yeah. Yeah. I have no zero doubt whatsoever. Yes. There's, there's, you know, the end of the show has led to a lot of questions for people. A lot of people are skeptical of the end.

And a lot of people have said, like, what does Dax think about this? Because, no spoilers, but you have a connection to something that's going on in this. And I hope I'm known as well, too. I have a very good bullshit meter. Yes. Yeah. I think they were definitely expecting you to be cynical about the end. Oh, yeah, no.

And I, well, it was funny because when I was, you know, we were making it and stuff, I, I think, I told you a little bit like, oh, this is going on. This is crazy. We're doing this. And I didn't at all think you'd be cynical. But then as soon as people started saying it, yeah. I was like, oh, no. Like, he might, he might hear this and be on that team. Yeah.

And I got scared. And like, again, back to, and I can't say it enough up front first. I absolutely love a million little pieces. Mm-hmm. James Frye. James Frey. Yeah. I love the book.

Yeah. I don't care at all that it was fictional. Right. I love the book. It's a beautiful book. And then my friend Leonard is almost maybe as good, the follow-up. Right. And it's just a beautiful story.

Yeah. But I also was reading it as Stephen King best said it. He wrote a little op-ed about it. Not one person in recover believed it. So weird. That's not the physics of how it all works. Yeah. And unless this guy was this one anomaly, which is possible, there are anomalies.

Yeah. But we all thought it was bullshit. Yeah. But I didn't care. Yeah. But yes, if I hear, this is why I hated Hillbilly Ellogy. I was wondering right. I'm like, this is bullshit.

This dude's story is he's overheard it secondhand and hasn't lived any of this. The ride that Hillbilly. Elegy has taken in my life is wild. You were definitely right about that. I was so wrong. Yeah, so given that track record, I'm a thousand percent certain as much as one can be. Yeah. That that person was speaking honestly.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. Well, I mean, I wish everyone at hers would really deconstruct. it a little bit, but it's just like, I think people, it's much easier when you're afraid of somebody or someone has wronged you to assume that there was a great deal of calculation happening. Yeah. And because it fits better with the archetype of villain and it fits better with the archetype of bad person. And as someone who's just on a lot of inexplicable things fucked up.

I'm like, I just can relate so much. Like, yeah, people could call me about some stuff. And I would be just as like absence of an explanation as the other people would be. Yes. Like, I don't know why at the, well, you know, in my four-day blackout, the time I think I got closest to dying, it's like, you know, only later the next day I'm realizing, like, well, clearly I tried to take a motorcycle, right? Because the motorcycle is sitting on its side. Yeah. I have pulled ribs.

I clearly must have tried to pick that motorcycle for a very long time. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know why, where I was going to go or what I thought I should be doing on a motorcycle or whatever. I just, you know, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I brought you up, obviously, multiple times at the end in our episode 10 when we recapped. And then we also did two more episodes on Patreon where we took a listener questions.

voicemails and then we like answered those and you know there's a lot of poking holes yeah and you know I think everyone has their own relationship with what happens in this story and that's also interesting to me for the people who don't believe I'm very compassionate to them yeah and sympathetic my hunches they have been lied to multiple multiple multiple times by an addict or a manipulator or deceiver. Yeah. And they have lost the willingness to trust again. And I get it. Me too. You know, there were, I felt that way about my dad in some categories. I was like, I'm not even ever buying back into this thing. So if you come in with that, yeah. And if you have no connection to it whatsoever, then you also have all these ideas. And I think that was for me, you know, before knowing you and like

Eric, I would have been skeptical too. I definitely would have been one of those people. But there have been so many experiences with you that are contradictory in a way that has made me change the way I think about people in a good way. Like, oh, it's really not black and white. It's not that this person behaves in this way and they don't behave in this way and they're this and they're not this. It's like, oh, my God, like, we really can be. We run the gamut. All of the things. It is totally changed my perspective on humans and for the better.

I mean, I'm so, I'm a better person because of it, definitely. It's the idea that I could never. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is the part that I don't believe in anymore. Like, I don't believe for your relapse, when all that was going on, it was so hard for me to compute that that was you still. Uh-huh. Like, how is this person who I know and love and trust and no wouldn't lie and, you know, is doing all of it?

Like, it's very, and it's very disorienting. And it's, but what I'm saying, and same with, you know, some stuff with some of our other friends, like, it's helpful. It's helpful to be reminded that we're all capable of all things at all times. And it doesn't mean someone's good or bad. And it definitely, it's definitely possible to do things that you don't think you'd ever do. Oh, yeah, they don't have to be addiction related. Everyone has the chance to do something they thought they would never do.

That's right. And it's- And everyone knows what's like to have secrets. Yeah. And to have regrets. Protect secrets. Have regrets and have remorse. And yeah, it's, well, because a lot of people were saying, like, how could the depth of the things that this person was doing?

How could they have possibly done that if they had this other thing going on? And I was like, uh, no. I was like, Dax was interviewing big experts. One of the smartest persons we've ever interviewed, in fact, at the lowest point. At the lowest point of detox. Exactly. It's like it's possible. And I understand if their specific relationship with addiction or those people like doesn't present that way.

Yeah, that's the other thing I think that's misleading about people who have kind of a generic idea of what an addict is, which is like everything the person is before they're fucked up is also carries over to when they're fucked up. Yeah. So it's like if someone's completely irresponsible sober, guess what? when they that's going to get exaggerated when but if you're incredibly controlling yeah and buttoned up guess what my version of addiction looks very much like that so it's like there isn't a single version of it it's like you just you carry into it all the things you already are and add that on top of it yeah i also think what's um good about knowing addicts is like it is helpful because, you know, we all just want answer. I mean, this show explores this too. Like,

we want answers the whole time during the show where questions are coming up and I'm like, why, wait, why? Why did this person do this? Why? What a? And there, you don't get answers often. We're trying to understand. Yeah, but it's also when that, when that person's done something painful, you want to know why. Like, if someone cheats on someone, they're going to be like, why? Why? And with addiction, what I have to sort of realize is like, there isn't a why that's like an obvious common question. And I think the reality is like you don't get that. You don't get that often. And it's okay to not get it. But it's, it's practiced. Like it's, you got to really peace. I think the why too, it does imply a strategy back to what we were saying. It's like this thing was

unfolding in the other person's experience of it, as much as it was unfolding in Andy and Elizabeth. Mm-hmm. There wasn't a game plan. There was a first thing that led to a second thing, that led to a fourth thing that led to a... And now it's this enormous snowball. Yeah. That is quite complex by the end of it. But like an initial dumb comment on a thing is like almost innocuous.

Yeah. And then it's maybe I'm commenting, you know, And it does grow. It doesn't necessarily require a game plan or a goal in mind from the person. It can be getting away from them just as much as it's getting away from the victim. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm really glad you liked it a lot.

And it is. Great job. It means a lot that you like it. Yeah, to you and Elizabeth and Andy. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, check out Beth said if you haven't. It's all available on your podcast.

You know, you can really barrel through it. If you're driving back and forth from Key West a lot. Couldn't recommend it enough. You want to do facts? Yeah, let's do some facts. When was Adam on last? He was on March 12th, 2020. Wow, right at that.

Wow, like maybe one of our first. He was in person. Oh, maybe one of our last. Yeah, because it came out then, so for sure we did it, like February. February 22nd, 2020 with him. So probably one of our last, yeah, before COVID. Okay. Now, are a disproportionate number of professional athletes little siblings? Says yes. Research indicates that a disproportionate number of professional and elite athletes are younger siblings.

Oh my God. The phenomenon often called the Little Brother effect. That's not. You haven't heard it in a positive light yet. Mine is Little Brother Energy. Thank you. Studies show that having older siblings to compete with from a young age forces younger children. to develop greater skills, tenacity and physical ability to keep up. The little brother sister effect. Growing up, yes, same. Reggie Miller's story's great.

This is the older sister, Cheryl Miller, is the greatest female basketball player of all time. Reggie Miller became one of the greatest of all time. But he was competing with his sister. And yeah, he talks about how long it took him to be able to beat his sister. Oh, cool. I like that one. Yeah, I like that too. Okay.

Does Coke own Desani? Yes. The Coca-Cola company owns license or markets more than 200 brands worldwide as of 2025, a reduction from over 400 in previous years to focus on stronger, high-potential products. While known for its flagship soda, the company's portfolio spans thousands of beverage products and cross-categories like water, coffee, teas, juices, and dairy. What's the difference between Mexican Coke and U.S. Coke? The primary difference between American and Mexican Coke is the sweetener.

Mexican Coke uses cane sugar, while American Coke uses. is high fruit toast corn syrup. Yeah. I think that's what you said. Also, Mexican Coke is typically packaged in glass bottles. Can't, Kansugi comes up yet again. They don't have it memorized. I know.

Yeah. Oh, he said creators making deals off platform to do post is a $15 billion industry. Uh-huh. The content creator brand deal industry is a massive rapidly expanding sector with Influencer marketing alone valued at roughly $24 billion in 2024 and projected to grow significantly. Wow. How much energy, water are we wasting when we say please and thank you to chat GPT? Oh, great.

It really wasn't giving me a very correct answer, and then that was concerning. Okay. Because it didn't want me to. Yeah. A recent study found that AI models like chat GBT use significant amounts of water to stay cool. Every 20 to 50 prompts you type, regardless of their early. urgency, depth, or silliness consume the equivalent of half a liter of freshwater. Okay.

Okay. He said Starlink is more than half the satellites in orbit. As of early 2026, Starlink satellites account for approximately 65% of all active operational satellites in orbit. And now Bezos is going to be putting satellites up, too. So there's just going to be like a trillion satellites. Yeah. It says with over 9,400 satellites in low orbit.

Low orbit. Urbit. Low Earth orbit, L.E.O. I'm just wondering, like, when they launch a spacecraft up out of low orbit, like, are they dodging those things? Like, how do they plan it? Like, will there not be a point where there's just a net of those fucking things and we can't even exit now? I know. Because certainly if you hit one of those going 17,500 miles an hour, which is how fast they're going.

That's going to be an ish. That's an ish, yeah. That's a big time ish. I have it. Oh, how's it going? It's fine so far. I have to have it. Yeah.

It's the only option. Yeah. Which is, I mean, that's interesting. I had a thought. I find myself doing this a little bit, and I kind of caught myself doing it. It was like, let's just say, if you hate Elon Musk, it's kind of natural that you would root for him to fail. You want him to fail, but what you stop, you don't think about is like, oh, I don't know, he's probably got 50, thousand employees.

Like Tesla is an American company that's employing 50,000 people. And there are a lot of people that would love to see Tesla just go under because they hate him. But you get to really look at like from an agallet or a utilitarian point of view is like, do you really want 50,000 jobs to go away? Do you really want a big American successful company to go under? Do you really want all that tax revenue to go away? Like that's a lot of damage because you hate one person. Yeah.

Yep. Does that make sense? It does make sense. It's like complicated. I do think that people with that kind of money just have this unlimited power. And then, but if they feel it, if their pocketbook feels it or their bottom line feels it, they do adjust. He's still a businessman at the end of the day. So if everyone stops.

But currently the Space X, they're talking about Space X having an IPO. And they're talking about it being probably the biggest IPO in the history of the stock market. And so even if you took away Tesla, this dude's going to be the richest guy. He's going to get richer. That company is wildly successful in Starlink is like. So at that point, you know, he's beyond probably hurting. unfortunately. Yeah.

And then you're just talking about like these tens of thousands of people that live in Texas that manufacture these cars and then the dealerships and all the mechanics and like, you know, and then just a big American car company. I found myself really going like, yeah, I guess I haven't been. Because I'll, I have found myself getting excited when I hear that like their stock went down or something. Right. And I'm like.

There are other companies, like there are other huge companies competing companies that that I align with more ideologically. And so I want to support that. I just want to support that more. Yeah. Unfortunately, there's none of the American big three that have gotten their foot in the door on Electric. He's like, that's the only company

that really got its foot in the door globally with electric. Yeah, I don't have that issue because I do not like Tesla's, regardless of him. Sure, sure, sure. If that was a car that I was like, fuck, like it's a, I love that car. I don't. I feel so nauseous in those cars. Like, I specifically ask on Uber, like, no Teslas.

Yeah. Because I don't like them. So that's not an issue for me. What's the, what's Kristen has an American electric? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I much prefer that driving experience. Yeah. I personally do too. Yeah. But I also, I want there to be thriving American. American industry that employs a lot of people. And then I feel like ethically compromise if I let my hatred of one person get in the way of 50,000 people's livelihood. Yeah, I mean, I guess I know what you mean,

but there's all these other people who have jobs at other companies, too, that are, that those jobs are being threatened with this monopoly being like, hell, you know, potentially held by him. So it's like, no, I'm probably just going to like veer off over here and try to put my money there. That's just, This is all personal. People get to spend their money how they want to spend it. That's right. You get to vote with your money. You do.

You get to do whatever you want. Oh, well, I would think it was abundantly clear in the interview, but I love Adam. I'm impressed that he puts himself out there on a hard topic. He's also pretty staggeringly smart. Yeah. Like when I've watched all these other interviews, like the amount of things he has a full comprehension is pretty massive. Yeah.

Which I think you have to in that role. Yes, definitely. Yeah, he was great. Yeah. All right, love you. And we're his favorite food. Oh, right, that's right. And that was flattering.

All right, love you. Love you.