Morning Brew Daily - Mark Zuckerberg talks Apple vs. Meta Headset Wars, AI Innovations & Raising Cattle

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Neal and Toby chat with Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to talk about his notorious Apple Vision Pro review video, the future of AI, what's next for Meta, and of course, cattle raisin' & meat smokin'.  Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howl. Today, we have an insane bonus episode for you. We are interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. Let's ride. Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, good to see you guys. Good to see you as well. All right. Let us jump right in. On Tuesday, you posted a video to Instagram where you reviewed the Apple Vision Pro, a competing headset, and compared it to your own The Quest 3. what we're all wondering is, why did you decide to make that video? You know, having a CEO publicly review a rival's product isn't exactly typical. You know, the CEO of Papa Johns isn't going over to Domino's and eating their pizza. Oh, man.

Well, I mean, look, in my household, it's basically like my wife, Priscilla, screaming at me to like, it's like, Mark, come to sleep. And I'm like, no, there's someone wrong on the internet. You got to do something about this. So, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the daily. But no, for real, though, I mean, you know, basically going into, but I hadn't tried the Vision Pro for a while, right? I mean, Apple wasn't like in a rush to give me one.

But going into that, you know, I sort of expected that for a device, though, I mean, their device is $3,500. Ours is $500. I kind of thought, okay, theirs would be better at a bunch of things than ours, but ours would still be the better value for most people, given that seven times less expensive. But when I actually got a chance to try theirs out, I was like, wow, it's actually,

ours isn't just the better value, it's the better product. And I think that, you know, I just saw all the media coverage around this was just sort of breathlessly assuming that, you know, I think because it's Apple and because it was such an expensive product, like it must be, you know, the better one in quality, even though a lot of people were saying, hey, no, you should probably go buy Quest 3 because it's a better price. And I don't know, I just wanted to,

kind of put my flag down and say, hey, no, you know, just because this thing costs seven times more, it doesn't mean it's better. If you actually go use case by use case on this thing, Quest three stacks up really well. And I'm just really proud of the work that we did. So I just kind of wanted to put that out there and say that. It was definitely you flex on them a little bit. You brought the receipts. On some level, though, you do have to be a little pleased that Apple is getting into the space because, well, everyone is talking about headsets now. They weren't as much this time last year. Do you think you're benefiting from this Apple halo effect? Well, I mean, I think competition does end up being good for people.

I mean, I'm a very competitive person. So, I mean, having a competitor who's doing a good job will also motivate us. And it's good for the teams. It creates more of a sense of urgency. So I do think that, you know, people really win when there's competition. And I definitely think that that's true. And yeah, I mean, I do think that because people sort of assume that if Apple comes into a space, they're going to do a good job, then it's like, hey, you know, maybe.

I hadn't considered wearing one of these headsets and now I will. And, you know, hey, the Quest 3 is actually better and it's $500. So I'll go for that one. I do think a lot of people are going to buy Quest because of that. So that's going to be going to be a pretty exciting thing. But I don't know. I mean, we're in this for the long term. I think it's going to be, you know, there are going to be a lot of ups and downs, you know, just.

So, I mean, I don't worry too much about any given year. I just try to, you know, do the best stuff that we can. I mean, speaking of a given year, I do want to take us back to 2007 for a second. There is this infamous Steve Balmer interview where he literally laughs at the iPhone after its introduction because he thought it was way too expensive. It didn't have a keyboard gasp and he said it would never really gain market share. Are you at all nervous that when you start comparing a product from Apple that is less than a month old to your product, which has 10 plus years of development behind it, that you might be making the same laughing at the iPhone like Steve Ballmer type mistake? I don't think so. I mean, look, first of all, I'm not laughing at them. I mean, I take Apple seriously. I think it's like a good company. They do good work. I mean, I'm just laying out the facts as I see them today. I'm not saying that they're not going to improve, but hey, we're going to improve too. And we're a company that moves pretty quickly. So I actually think we'll probably improve faster. But I do think that there's this whole vibe with Apple fanboys, which I find kind of a little funny and, you know, where it's like a lot of people just get upset if you're, you know, you dare to question if Apple is going to lead in a new space.

And I don't know. I mean, I just think if you look at the history of computing, every major generation has sort of an open model where it's more partnership-oriented, more favorable to developers. And then they have a closed model where it's just like, you know, it's usually just Apple, basically just integrating all their stuff closely together. And yeah, in mobile, Apple One, I mean, there's technically more Android phones out there. But, you know, basically Apple, from a business perspective, one and in all the developed countries where people can afford their products, I mean, people basically prefer the iPhone.

But that's not the way it always works, right? And PCs before that, you know, in the 90s, you know, Microsoft and Windows were really the leader in the open model. So I just don't think that the future is written on this yet. And I think that for this next generation, Apple's clearly going to be the closed model. you know, meta and our approach is going to be more open and partnership oriented, more developer focused. And, you know, I think we have a really good chance at winning. And I, I'm really committed to doing that. I mean, I'm like a, you know, I'm a competitive person. I'm like passionate about what we're doing and like, we're playing to win. So no, I mean, you know, it's, I can't like sit here and guarantee that the future will go one way or another. But I think people who will, who try to say that there's no chance that it goes the other way, are just wrong. I think that this is an open game

and I feel pretty good about the team and the effort and the products that we're putting out. Apple fanboys have been put on notice. Absolutely. And we know you're a competitive person too, and we're going to get to that later in the show. But I do want to talk about Neil and I's personal experience with the Quest 3. We actually tried it on yesterday, had a great time while I was in it. But as soon as I took it off and looked at Neil across the room, kind of waving his arms around it. He was playing Bidsaber at one point. And I thought to myself, whoa, this is pretty socially isolating, actually, if you're not

physically wearing it. Is this the future that you or that you think consumers and people really want? Well, I think that there's a mix. I mean, we do spend a lot of time in front of our computers today. You know, I think that there's a space for having a big TV or an entertainment station in your living room where you kind of do immersive things for hours at a time. play games. I think that that is a thing that I think people want. But, you know, when I see these videos of people like wearing these devices walking down the street, that is not what we're

designing this for. I do think that there's going to be a mobile version in this next, in this next generation of computing. And that's more going to be glasses. And we're getting started on that with the Rayband meta smart glasses that we put out that are doing really well. You know, it's in the second generation that we just put out. It's, you know, we have meta AI in there. there's a lot of really exciting use cases. I'm really excited to roll out the multimodal part of that, which basically in AI speak is like you can ask questions using both the camera. So it's like look at what's around and you can speak to it.

So we have people doing stuff like going for a walking tour around Stanford campus. And it's just like look at a building and they just ask the glass. It's like, hey, look and tell me what is the significance of this building and the history behind it. okay, what about this sculpture that's here? Tell me about that. And I mean, just, that's like pretty wild and can be more social stuff. And I think is more the thing that you're going to see more out in the world. But I mean, yeah, look, people do spend many hours in front of, you know, in front of their big screens today, either doing entertainment or productivity type things. And, you know, increasingly even fitness oriented devices with things like Peloton or, you know, big screen

component of that. So will the future involve those activities, but in a more immersive version of that? Yeah, I think so. And I think part of what we need to do is make that social, right? So part of it is the mixed reality, so you can see the physical world around you and blend the digital objects into that. That's a big part of what we did. That was the big jump from Quest 2 to Quest 3 is now we have this high resolution, color, mixed reality pass through so you can see the world around you and put digital objects there. But, you know, a big focus for us is. When I talk about the Metaverse, it is about that kind of social sense of presence and being there with other people, which is something that we kind of designed into our products to make them all sort of multiplayer and social.

And I just think, I mean, that's like the DNA of our company. So like, you know we're going to really focus on that. That's an area where I think we'll probably do the best work in the industry. So in your ideal world, someone would be using the Quest headset in their home and then wear out the glasses. Is that kind of the relationship between those two? Yeah, I mean, I think that you can think of the glasses as the next computing generation's phone, right? It's the mobile, truly you're using it on the go computing platform, whereas I think the headset is going to be more the next generation's computer or TV screen. So the bigger screens that you have.

And yeah, I mean, I think for most people, the phone is probably the more important device in their life. And I think that that's probably going to be true in this next generation that the glass. that the glasses are probably going to be the more important and more ubiquitous thing. But I think that they're both meaningful. And I also think technologically, there's a path where you want to build kind of this immersive, kind of 3D content. And you can build it first in mixed reality because the devices, by virtue of the fact that they're a bit bigger, have more compute. So it's easier to build stuff there. And then by the time we get to glasses that can put holograms in the world, we'll have built up the whole kind of developer ecosystem.

system and platform to have a bunch of the content there. But the thing that I think has been really cool is, you know, I kind of thought that smart glasses weren't going to be a, like, ubiquitous consumer product until we got to that kind of hologram and putting, you know, digital objects, you know, just overlaying them physically on the world. But then this kind of crazy thing happened in the last year, which is this emergence of these AI models, right, where you can talk to them and ask, ask questions, and, you know, they can do a lot of things for you. So now I actually think that something like the Rayban meta smart glasses is going to have much broader appeal than I would have guessed even a few years ago. I mean, we sort of when we started that, we thought of it as

like the kind of intro project working our way up towards, towards holograms, where, whereas now I actually think a lot of people are just going to want that, right? Because, you know, it's, it's an affordable product. It's a stylish product. It's like, you don't need to cram a ton of technology into it. You can just like, yeah, it's like it has cameras, it has speakers, it has a microphone. You can talk to AI. It's, you can take phone calls on it. You can listen to audio books while you're out there. It's, you know, it's just pretty, pretty capable already. Right. Many, many people in the tech industry have been questioning whether AI will render the end of the smartphone and they're building, they're building these different hardware gadgets from a pin to Pepper's little thing. I don't even know how

you would describe it. But you think that the smartphone, because of AI will replace, or I'm sorry, the glasses will replace the smartphone. Well, I guess maybe I should clarify that. I think what tends to happen is that the last generation of computing doesn't go away, right? It's not like when we got phones, like people stopped using computers, but you do shift in terms of use, right? So, like, before we probably used computers more and then we got phones, and now I do a lot of stuff on my phone today that I would have done on my computer before, and that's clearly the primary thing.

So what I think is going to happen is that glasses are going to become the primary mobile device. I'm not predicting that in 10 years, like, we're not also going to have phones. I just think that, like, a lot of the time they're going to sit in our pocket when we're just doing stuff that we can do more naturally and in a more socially good way with glasses without having to have something in your hand or, like, take your kind of eyes away from the interaction they were having and look down at a phone. And so, but I'm not, I'm certainly not predicting the kind of complete disappearance of phones. I think that that's not in the cards, I think, anytime soon. And to some degree, I think the glasses will interact with the phone because, you know, if you're asking the glass as a question, the AI basically connects to the phone and then uses the phone's connection to the internet to then talk to our infrastructure to ask the

question and get it resolved. So we're kind of betting that you will have a phone. You will probably just take it out a lot less. I've been so surprised to see the creator, kind of. of economy embrace this product as well. I don't know if you saw the trend that went pretty viral on TikTok of people kind of dancing around while wearing the glasses. That, completely organic, by the way. And I was just surprised to see them kind of immediately glom onto this new piece of technology and immediately integrate it into their content. Were you surprised about that or was that

the goal all along? Well, it's always awesome to see. And, you know, I mean, my history and like where I come from. I'm more of like an engineer, right, it builds software. So building stylish hardware is relatively new for me. Right. I mean, that's, that's not like, Mark, you got a quiet luxury vibe to you. Give yourself some credit. Okay. I mean, your style. I appreciate that. But that's wearing other people stuff. But it's, you know, it's, don't get me wrong. I have a lot confidence. I do believe that like, you know, given enough iterations, I can, I can build, I can, I can kind of get there on building the stuff that we want to. But for this one, we did something different, which is we worked with Rayban. And, you know, they're like, you know, the company

that builds the Raybans is the leading, you know, fashion and kind of glasses company in the world. So they do great work on style and luxury, which it's really been a very fascinating partnership. I mean, the technology behind even producing kind of normal glasses before you put any electronics in it is actually quite sophisticated. And we've learned a lot about working with them about how do you integrate kind of this new consumer electronics technology with all the technology that goes into creating like really sophisticated lenses and making it's that the materials in the in the glasses feel premium but are light. So there's all this stuff that I think like neither one company could have done

on their own. But through the partnership, I think we've produced something that brings state-of-the-art technology around AI with something that has been a fashion icon for decades. And I think it's pretty neat. Yeah, I mean, it's, I don't know, it's tough for me to predict exactly what the uptake would be. But it's, I mean, it's not that out of the question. I think a lot of that is because, you know, the design is really nice. Okay, I do want to transition to a pretty under the radar topic right now. We've mentioned a few times already on the show, and that is artificial intelligence. On your most recent earnings call, the phrase AI was mentioned 70 times versus just seven for the

metaverse. You change your company name to meta, and you keep saying you're not trading AI and the metaverse, but it still feels like that's where the industry focus is right now. The metaverse feels pretty 2022 right now. How much did your strategy shift after AI kind of blew up when ChatGBT was released? Well, you know, we've been working on AI and the Metaverse for a long time. I mean, those have been the two major kind of big tech bets for the company for like a decade. And, you know, the reality is that we're spending, if you just look at how much we're investing,

it's like $15 billion a year at least into each of them. So, yeah, I mean, what we talk about will vary at different points. And, yeah, like what we see happening in the industry will help sharpen our product strategy and in our sense of what we can be building. Right now, I definitely think where we are in the hype cycle is much more, you know, people want to talk about AI. Whereas, you know, yeah, in like in 21, 22, I think people are pretty excited about the talking about the Metaverse.

Now I think we're in this mode where people are waiting for the products to get like more fully adopted. But like we're just kind of quietly churning and building this stuff in the background. Like I don't care that much whether something is cool one year or not. But yeah, I mean, at a moment when people have more questions about the AI work that we're doing, I think it's natural that you'll hear me be talking more about AI. When the Metaverse space heats up a bit, you know, or people try to call it different things because they don't want to embrace our branding around this. But it's, but when that kind of heats up, then, you know, you go through these moments where, okay, now we're talking about our headsets or that stuff more. So I just think this will kind of go back and forth a little bit over the next several years.

But the reality is that these have been huge focuses for a while and I think are going to continue to be for like the next decade or so until these things both reach their full potential. Let's talk about Sam Altman a bit. The Open AI CEO, he's been reportedly trying to raise $7 trillion to build a semiconductor infrastructure needed to power artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA's CEO said this week that Altman's plan was overkill. But what do you think? Is Sam insane? or is this scale of investment needed to support the development of AI?

I don't know. I mean, Sam is, I think, actually, like a very earnest and thoughtful guy. And I think his level of ambition for the space, I think, has been very helpful for building it out overall. And, I mean, the number is astronomical. So, I mean, it is hard to kind of wrap my head around that. But honestly, I haven't gotten a chance to talk to Sam about it.

So I don't want to kind of weigh in too much on that. But I think the place that he's right is that like, you know, if you look year over year, these companies keep on building these larger and larger training clusters of computers to basically train the state-of-the-art models. So it's like a couple of years ago. Maybe it was like a thousand chips that you kind of wired together. Then it's 10,000. Then it's 100,000.

You know, at some point it's going to be a million, right? And then it's like at some point, okay, yeah, you really need to produce a ton of chips. So at that point, I don't think. he is crazy. I don't know what it will take to kind of accelerate all of this to the point where kind of the technological curve can keep up. But I don't know, I think that this is one of these things where like building software sometimes hits roadblocks when you get into physical stuff. Right. And all the stuff that we do, it's like when we're building the apps, right, you're building like Instagram or WhatsApp or Facebook, you know, we can just ship updates like every

week. But, you know, when we're building like a new headset, it's like, okay, we work on that for two years and we ship one headset, right? And then we, you know, work on another one for two years, ship another headset. It's just that the cycle time is slower. So I think the software part of AI will probably want to move fast, but I think at some point, Sam is right that we're going to run into some physical constraints on like how many chips can you churn out and, you know, how much power you need from like power plants to be able to train the next bigger model. And I don't No, I think it's, it is worth thinking about how to, how to kind of alleviate some of those constraints, because I think it's just going to enable, and this technology is going to enable all these awesome use cases that I think are going to make our lives better in so many ways. I do just want to get into kind of the philosophical argument around AI a little bit.

On one side of the spectrum, you have people who think that it's got the potential to kind of wipe out humanity and we should hit pause on the most advanced systems. And on the other hand, you have the Mark Andresens of the world who said stopping AI investment is literally akin to murder because it would prevent. Valuable breakthroughs in the healthcare space. Where do you kind of fall on that continuum? Well, I'm really focused on open source, which is I'm not sure exactly where we would fit on the continuum, but my theory of this is that what you want to prevent is like one organization from getting like way more advanced and powerful than everyone else. Here's like one thought experiment is, okay, like every year kind of security folks and are figuring out, you know, what are all these bugs in our software that can get exploited if you don't do these security updates, right? And it's like everyone who's using, you know, any modern technology is constantly doing security updates and updates for stuff. So if you could go back 10 years in time and kind of know all the bugs that would exist, then like any given organization would basically be able to like exploit everyone else. And that would be bad. Right. It would be bad.

if someone was way more advanced than everyone else in the world, because it could lead to some like really uneven outcomes. And the way that the industry has tended to deal with this is by making a lot of infrastructure open source. So that way it can just get rolled out and every piece of software can kind of get incrementally a little bit stronger and safer together. So that's the case that I worry about for the future. It's not like, I mean, I don't want to write off the potential that like there's some runaway thing,

but right now I don't see it. I don't see it anytime soon. The thing that I worry about more sociologically is just like one organization basically having some like really super intelligent capability that isn't broadly shared. And I think the way you get around that is by open sourcing it, which is what we do. And the reason why we can do that is because we don't have a business model to sell it. Right. So if you're if you're Google or your open AI, right, I mean, this stuff is expensive to build. The business model that they have is they kind of build a model. They fund it. They sell access to it. So they kind of need to keep it closed. And it's not, I mean, it's not their fault. I just think that that's like where the business model has led them. But we're kind of in a

different zone. I mean, we're not selling access to this stuff. We're building models and using it as an ingredient to build our products, whether it's like the Rayban glasses or, you know, an AI assistant across all our software or, you know, eventually AI tools for creators that everyone's going to be able to use to kind of like let your community engage with you when, when you can't engage with them and things like that. And so open sourcing, it actually fits really well with our model. But that's kind of my theory of the case, is that, is that, yeah, this is going to do a lot more good than harm. And the bigger harms are basically from having the system either not be widely or evenly deployed or not hardened enough, which is the other thing is open source software tends to

be more secure historically because you make it open source. It's more widely available. So more people can kind of poke holes out it. And then you, have to fix the holes. So I think that this is the best bet for keeping it safe over time and part of the reason why we're pushing in this direction. I'd love your take on AI in the job market. You know, there's a lot of anxiety among people that AI could replace them, especially with all the tech layoffs of the last few years and companies signaling huge investments in AI. From your point of view as the person who is literally building these systems, say I'm the average white collar employee working in professional services as an accountant, say,

Should I be worried, like, should I pivot my career to become a chatbot prompt engineer or whatever? I'm not sure I'd pivot my career yet. I mean, look, there's a lot in what you're saying. Over the long term, I'm actually quite bullish that all these tools will give more people the potential to kind of do what they care about. It's like when I see my kids, it's like, you know, they want to do all this creative stuff. And then we're like, go eat broccoli. Right. And I do think that they, like, a lot of people, I think, maybe are not in the jobs that they would, like, ideally want to be in.

And I think in the future, we'll just have the capacity to do more of that. So I think that that's, that is the long term. But then there's always the question of how do you get there? And yeah, I think that there will be a bunch of transformation that will mean that certain jobs, we don't do them in the way that we're doing them now. certain things might get automated. But I don't know, I just think that the limit to human ingenuity, I don't know, it's either kind of limitless or extremely high. And I just don't think we're anywhere near kind of fulfilling that potential yet.

So I'm much more optimistic about that. In terms of the layoffs and stuff like that, I actually think that that was more due to companies trying to navigate COVID in the pandemic. And I mean, it was sort of this weird wave where, you know, it's, At first, we saw e-commerce go through the roof. And it's like, okay, yeah, because a lot of people aren't going out and physically shopping. But it was really hard to predict, okay, are you, like, is that going to continue? Is, like, all this e-commerce is just better than physical shopping or like, what's the balance after?

And I think across the economy, a lot of companies just kind of overbuilt. And then when things went back to pretty close to exactly the way they were before, it, I think a lot of companies realized, hey, we're kind of not in a good financial place because we overbuilt. And then, so you had this wave of layoffs that were basically responding to that, but then you also had this generation of companies that knew nothing except growth. So the idea of like doing layoffs was just like, oh no, this is crazy. Like we couldn't even comprehend that, but then they had to do it. And then I think a lot of companies went through this zone of thinking, hey, you know, that actually, it didn't end the company. It was obviously really tough. We parted

with a lot of talented people we cared about. But in some ways, actually becoming leaner kind of makes the companies more effective. So now I think that there's another kind of way of that a bunch of companies are going through. I mean, we did this last year, but I think some companies are kind of still in this mode of thinking, okay, well, we're thinking about like how efficient and lean we should be. maybe we should be a somewhat different shape than we are now to do the best work that we can. But I don't think that that, at least for us, it was not, you know, the AI stuff was not a major driver of that. It was like first, just kind of this overbuilding and then the sense of like, let's do the best work that we can by making a lean company. As lean as you can be for, you know, our scale.

It just, yeah, it does feel like the layoffs of early 2024 do have some, this AI tinge to it. It's not the back-to-normal stuff because when you listen to these CEOs on their earnings calls and when they're doing the layoff announcements, it's more strategic reorganizing of their focus where they're investing more in AI. And they're not saying, I'm laying you off because of that. But it's just a trimming of certain departments and they're hiring in others. So to me, I feel like this wave of layoffs is a little bit different than the ones coming out of, like, early 2023, like yours. Yeah, that's possible.

I mean, maybe, I mean, I'm just mostly commenting on what, what I see in our company and sort of our, our kind of peers and the companies around me in the tech industry. But there's certainly broader stuff. So I just maybe, I'm not seeing that one as clearly. Yeah. Last question on AI here. You have a lot of listeners who have may have only interacted with AI on a very limited basis. If you wanted to blow their minds, delight their imaginations, what would you show them right now? How would you exemplify the power of AI to someone who hasn't really experienced it so far?

I mean, I think the Ray-Ban glasses are going to enable, like already do and will enable some pretty mind-blowing things. And I think people always tend to think that these physical kind of manifestations of things are more impressive than just the software-only ones. So I think having glasses that can see what you see, hear what you hear, you can ask questions about what's going on around you. I do think the ability to, like I was saying, like, walk around through some kind of historic place and just ask it to like look at stuff and explain to me what, what matters about this. You go into a store and you're like, okay, like, is this a good price for this thing? Or, you know, it's like, what is this? Where else can I get this? I think that that stuff is just going to be super valuable. Yeah.

And it's only going to get crazier. So, I mean, some of the stuff that we're working on, I mean, there's a lot of. always this question of like, how do you talk to the AI where it's like today, okay, you type on a computer or a phone and on the glasses you speak to it. And one of the wilder things that we're working on is this neural interface. And I don't mean like a chip that you jack into your brain. I think that, I mean, maybe in the future someone will do that, but I don't know, I don't want to, I wouldn't want to use version one of that, right? I mean, let me just say, right? I think you might want to wait until that one's pretty mature. We're catching your drift. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like,

I don't want to, you know, let's wait until I don't need to, like, upgrade that thing every year. But I think the one that we're working on is basically a wristband. And the way that it works is it's a neural interface in the sense that it, the way that your kind of brain communicates with your body and, like, controls the way you move is it sends these, these like nervous system signals to your muscles. And you can actually pick those up with, with an EMG wristband. And it turns out that there's like all this extra bandwidth and like all this extra signal that your brain can send that is not currently being used to move your fingers in the way that you want.

And you can just like, you'll be able to in the future essentially just like type and control something like by kind of thinking about how you want to move your hand. But like it won't even be like big motions. So I can just sit here and I'm like basically typing something to an AI. and then, you know, right now with the glasses, it basically can speak back to you. But in the future, I think you'll have something where it can speak to you or there will be a little display so it can show you like a notification. So I think you'll have this completely kind of private and discreet interface where you can like walk around, you know, throughout your day, just like text different things. I mean, you can text your friends or you can text your AI and then basically just get the response back in real time. I think that that is just going to be insane.

And it's, you know, the research is like, it's like we've been working on this for a while. So it's actually, you know, it's not a one-year project, but we're quite a few years into it. And we're actually kind of close to kind of having something here that we're going to have a product in the next few years. So I'm pretty excited about that. I mean, you're making teachers lives harder. Imagine someone with their hand in their pocket researching AI stuff while taking a test. Turnitin.com is going to have to really boister their defense. for sure.

All right, Mark, let's talk about you. People want to know more about you. So you've been leading Facebook, now Meta for 20 years, literally more than half of your life. I'm sorry to remind you. How has your management style evolved over the past two decades? Oh, man.

I mean, that question assumes that I had a management style when I got started. I'm not assuming anything. The reality is like, like, I didn't, when I started Facebook, I wasn't trying to start a company. I just thought it was this cool thing to build. And I was pretty convinced when I was in college,

my aspiration was I liked building stuff, and I thought I was going to just go through college and then go be an engineer at Microsoft. And my mom was like, nah, you're going to make a company. And I was like, no, I'm not going to make a company. Yeah, my mom actually bet me that I was going to drop out of college. I was like, mom, it's like what? Is it like in a good way or a bad way?

And she's like, I don't know, we'll see. Wait, before you went to college? She said you're going to drop out. Yes. Shout out mom. Wow. Yeah, no. Mom. Yeah, mom. And my younger sister bet that she was going to finish college before me, which also happened, obviously. So, yeah, so I started this company, but I didn't start it as a company, right? I just, this is partially why I was so messy in the beginning. We basically ended up turning it into a company because it's like, all right, in order to scale it, we needed money, which means we needed a business model and revenue and all. that stuff. So basically, you know, pulled a group of people together to try to do that. But I didn't

know anything about building a company. I mean, that, like, wasn't my goal. And it just, you know, it just turns out if you want to do big things, it like helps to have the resources. And in order to be able to get the resources, you want to have a business model that supports that. So I guess over time, I've sort of had to just learn a lot of stuff. And I've done that mostly by working with really good people. I mean, one of my mentors and, you know, my business partner for a long time, Cheryl Sandberg, you know, we joke that she like raised me as a manager and like as a parent almost. And I think that that's true in a lot of ways. It's, I mean, a lot of my kind of leadership philosophy and management just came from working with her and other people who I really respected

who had more experience. But now we're sort of in this funny place where like, and if you look at early Facebook in like 2004, 2005, we were basically just like a bunch of kids running around. just like building stuff that we thought was cool and then like had some more professional executives helping to run the place. But now all the kids have grown up, right? So, you know, you have people like Chris Cox, our chief product officers, been there.

I think he joined in like 2005 or 2006. Andrew Bosworth, who runs reality labs, similarly, you know, has been there for, you know, it's like, it's got to be, it's 18 or 19 years at this point. So, and along the way, I think we all just kind of, learned how to run a company together and you know we're all like pretty close friends and um and it's just interesting because you can't hire that right it's like if you're just thinking about today it's like okay if i was trying to build a team or like what advice would you give people it's like i don't know you

can't you know there's no nothing that kind of replaces all those years of of just experience getting to know each other and going through all these times where everyone thinks you suck and then other times when you know people are just giving you way too much credit for stuff that clearly isn't going to actually pan out for for a few years, but you believe in it. And we've just been through all those experiences. So I don't know. I think it's, the secret to all this stuff is it's not one person. And as much as I think like the world wants to focus on like who's the singular figure, it's always more than one person. And it's the team dynamic. And I think that that matters a lot. So, I mean, if you can just kind of stay focused, you find stuff that you like, you stay engaged.

You know, I don't mean, by the way, that it's like, okay, you set up the team and then you're kind of passive, right? I think, like, probably one of my most controversial leadership or management things is, like, I don't actually believe in delegating that much. I kind of think, like, the way a founder should work is you should basically make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can. And, like, I mean, you need to know where your limits are and where, like, you're just thrashing people. because you're involved in something in a half-ass way and like you can't you're not actually you don't have all the context but I don't know I mean you need all these other awesome people because there's still going to be no matter how much time I put into all these things there's still going to be so much stuff that I can't get to and we need awesome people who can like do all the

really important stuff that like I'm not I'm not doing but but I don't know that's something that I guess I've just gotten more confident in over time is just sort of feeling like hey yeah I can go deep on all this stuff and You know, push it in a direction that I think. And yeah, not everything is going to go well in the near term. But, like, you just learn. Rinse and repeat. Do good work over a long period of time.

It sounds like you're having a great time still leading this company. You've been at it for a very long time. But we've got to talk about some of these hobbies, Mark. Probably the one that people most know you for is your love of mixed martial arts, but you also fly helicopters. You hydrofoil. You love smoking meats. And you're actually raising your own cow right now.

What's the current obsession for Mark Zuckerberg? Oh, gosh. Right now I'm focused a lot on knee rehab. Yeah. So I can get back to fighting. It's like, man, I mean, spend a bunch of time fighting, but rehab takes a lot of time. Because you want to, like, stay in shape and like, and you can't do everything that you were doing before. So it's actually, it's not super time efficient, but it's really important.

So that's, that I think is my main thing. But I really like fighting in combat sports. I mean, that's been awesome. But no, I mean, look, I mean, I've loved, I mean, the whole meat thing has sort of been a fascination for a long time. I mean, look, ever since that, yeah, sweet baby Ray is just sitting out here with friends smoking meats. You know, it's, it's, yeah, I mean, I love it. And I always joke with Priscilla and my, my. daughters now that if I'm ever done with meta I'm gonna run Marks Meets and you know like

if you're like if you're like a kid right so like my daughters it's kind of hard to wrap your head around like what meta is right because it's just this very abstract like app right it's okay you're like a young kid right so my daughter is for a while she was just a she just thought that I was a cattle rancher she's like all right like dad that's like that's clearly what you do it's like you're it's like Mark's meets isn't ready for prime time yet but you're really focused on it. I get it. It's like you've got like a few of these cows.

And I've just had this project where I want to see if we can produce some of the highest quality meat in the world. And I think most commercial cattle operations are basically constrained where you can't put more into the cow in terms of quality of ingredients than you can then turn around and sell the cow for when you're done. But, you know, I obviously don't have that issue. I'm not, like, trying to do this commercially. I'm just trying to create the highest quality stuff that we can. So, and I think it's pretty fun to, like, vertically integrate. So I'm like, all right, let's see if we can, like, what is the densest, most, like, nutritious thing that we can feed these cows to basically get them to be, like, the healthiest and, like, gain weight as quickly as possible and just be the most delicious cows. And it's like, all right, well, as a human, what do you think, like, is the thing that basically, you know, you just like sit and eat a lot?

It's like beer and nuts, basically, right? And so nuts, super dense. Beer induces appetite, which I think people are familiar with. But, yeah, induces appetite, I think, is the kind of formal, you know, jargon in the cattle industry for, you know, gets them to eat a bunch. which is why, you know, for a long time, a lot of the highest quality Wagyu beef, they basically fed at beer. It's not, like, there's this whole thing about, okay, does it make it more relaxed? The scientific literature on that is a little mixed.

I've, like, read a bunch of this. It's not, I'm not convinced on the relaxation point, but I do think it's clear that it makes them eat more and then they gain more weight. So, yeah, so, but I just think it's like super fun. It's like, all right, let's brew our own beer. Let's, let's grow our own. own macadamia nuts process that like have our kids be the kind of a part of the process of like figuring out what it's like to to kind of run this kind of a process easier for them to do that

than be involved in the software business so I think that that that kind of makes sense and um I don't know it's just fun maybe one day it'll be a thing but for now I'm just producing some meat that I like eating mark the women in your life are telling you something your mom said you're going to drop out of college and your daughter said that you are going to be a catalympal rancher. So I would take that advice to heart. Yeah, I mean, they're usually right. We will workshop the name though. Marks Meets. There's still some room to grow there as well. Oh, no, it's intentionally really lame. All right, all right. Then you absolutely named it then. It also sounds like you could be the Andrew Huberman of like cattle ranchers. You could launch a podcast

about just cattle health. Because I was learning a lot right there. You had me enrapped it. So maybe you and Andrew team up for a little cattle pod. The cattle verse. The cattle verse. The cattle verse. You heard it here first. Mark, this was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to stop by and nerd out with us.

I'm going to actually plug your social accounts right now. You can follow Mark on the social networks he invented at Zuck. That was a very cool sentence to say. And then also check out all the cool work happening at the Chan Zuckerberg initiative to see all the work that you are doing with your wife, Priscilla. Mark, once again, thank you so much for joining us. Awesome. Thanks for having me on, guys. See ya.