Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Talking Tech with Mark Zuckerberg: Uncut

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

Today, we have a special bonus episode of Waveform! We recently had an interview with Mark Zuckerberg in our series "Talking Tech" on the MKBHD channel, but we left a bit of it on the cutting room floor. Hence, we decided to upload the full and uncut version of the interview to Waveform to let you hear everything we talked about, in its entirety! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Talking Tech with Mark Zuckerberg: https://bit.ly/3c2Uw22 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And this is a bonus episode. This is the full uncut interview conversation with Mark Zuckerberg from the Talking Tech series. So the Talking Tech video that's on the channel is, of course, cut a little bit for time. It's cut for YouTube the way they usually are. But this is something I kind of thought about when we were starting the podcast in the first place is to have a place for these completely unedited conversations to be. So there is still a YouTube version that's up on the channel. But I figured you guys wanted to hear everything that was talked about.

So there's a little extra about folding phones, a little extra about his job at Facebook and Oculus and Instagram. So for all of that chat, buckle up. Let's get into it. All right, Mark, what's up, man? It's good. How are you? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm good. So for the Talking Tech series, I think we always start by an introduction. I don't know if you need an introduction to this audience, but I think people know you as the co-founder of

Facebook, the face of Facebook. But I'll let you introduce yourself. What's your role every day and what is that like for you? Yeah, well, I guess I started the company and I've been running it for the last 16 years. And the goal that we have is just to give people a lot of different tools to be able to express themselves in all the ways that they want and connect with all the people that they want to. So that varies from the set of apps that you might have on your phone to some more far-reaching advanced technologies like the work that we're doing in virtual and augmented reality, which is personally one of the things that makes me the most excited. We have these announcements coming out at Facebook Connect about some of the new work that we're doing.

So it's, you know, I think, you know, my job is pretty varied. You know, I never really know when I wake up in the morning what, you know, what is going to be thrown at me that day. But overall, it's a really interesting mix of intellectual problems. And I just am grateful to get the chance to build stuff that so many people around the world love and use every day. Yeah, that's really interesting, actually. Do you split your time on the regular between Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp? Or is it sort of every day has a little bit of everything?

Yeah, I definitely split my time a bit more because there are just so many pieces at this point that if I were trying to tune into everything every day, then it would just be too much context switching. So as a matter of fact, what I try to do is like have a theme for a week. And usually I can't get away with just one theme, but I'll try to do two or three things for a week. And usually I can't get away with just one theme, but I'll try to do two or three things

in a week and have most of my time be focused on kind of nailing that and doing a good job at that. And then of course different things come up. I'm talking to people throughout the day. But we have really good people running each of the apps. Boz runs Facebook Reality Labs, which is the group that's in charge of the VR and AR work. So it's a good team of a lot of really talented people from a lot of different backgrounds who kind of, you know, it works well as a team. And that allows me to focus on, you know, some of the stuff that I

think is the most important and whatever is coming up that I need to deal with. Gotcha. So I think one of the most interesting parts of the Talking Tech series when I get to speak to people is everyone has a unique perspective on tech in some way. And obviously you being at the head of a very important company like Oculus, that's what I'm most interested in because at the head of it,

you kind of have to have some sort of a vision for what you think the future of it is, which is, I guess, hard for me to wrap my head around. But can you talk a little bit about Oculus now? Like the Oculus Quest 2 by the time this comes out will be the newest, latest and greatest. But what does that future roadmap for a company like Oculus look like? Yeah. So if you look at the kind of broad history of technology, we get these new major technology platforms every 15 years or so. And each one delivers a more immersive experience and allows us to communicate with the people and businesses and things that we care about around the world with just higher fidelity. And when I look at what we have today on our phones, phones are pretty amazing. You have this incredibly powerful computer in your pocket, but

it's not the end of the line. And there's all these things that I think are not that good about it. It pulls you away from the world around you. It's anything but immersive, right? It's a small screen. So the question that I've been asking is, you know, what's the next wave of technology and what's the next platform going to be and what's that going to deliver for how we all connect? And for me, the essence of virtual and augmented reality is that you need to have a technology

that delivers this feeling of presence, right? The sense that you're actually right there with another person and all the different sensations that come with that normally, right? Not just seeing someone on a screen, but having the spatial audio so it sounds like if someone's standing over there, the audio is coming from there. Having it so that you can kind of, if you're interacting with them and you have an object, you can pass them the object, right? And it's kind of real time and there's no latency.

Our eyes refresh every five or 10 milliseconds. So having it so that you can have this whole 3D world and what other people are doing render in real time faster than that so it just feels real, I think that that's different. In every other type of technology platform that we've had, game consoles on TVs, computers, you get some pretty amazing software, but you're basically trying to convince your brain the whole time that you're in a different context than you actually are when you're really just kind of sitting on your couch or your desk. VR and AR are the first platform where it really just convinces your system that you're in just kind of sitting on your couch or your desk. VR and AR are the first platform where it really just convinces your system that you're in a different place. You almost have to

try to convince yourself to snap out of the reality sometimes and realize, hey, this actually isn't real. I'm in a different physical place. But that's pretty powerful. So there's a long line of technology that we need to develop to fully deliver that sense of presence. But I think that that's really what we're in the business of doing with the Oculus virtual reality product lines and with the augmented reality glasses that we're working on over the coming years, is just how do we deliver that sense of presence and connection for people? Yeah. I like that train of thinking. A question I get asked a lot in my interviews or various places that I get asked this is like, I do video now on YouTube

and my goal is always to make the highest quality video possible. So like I can put a product in front of you and it looks as realistic as possible, almost like you're holding yourself. But what's the next version of that? Maybe the next version of tech reviews 10 years into the future after its YouTube videos? And my natural answer has been, I think VR makes the most sense.

If I could literally kind of like put you in my shoes, then you'll feel like you're in the car that I'm driving or holding the phone that I'm holding. Is that a dumb answer? Have I been giving a good answer this whole time? I certainly agree with that. But, you know, I mean, our company is probably investing the most in virtual and augmented reality of anyone else in the world. So, yeah, I mean, I would hope that 10 years from now or five years from now, you know, people will have a relatively sleek pair of goggles that they can put on and basically transport into your studio where you are.

And instead of just holding up the phone in front of you like you just did, they could grab it, that you can hand it to them and they can play with it and kind of experience that themselves. Or maybe the lighter weight version of that would be augmented reality, which I think you're still going to have to go into some kind of different mode to want to put on sunglasses or goggles and have that fully immersive virtual experience for virtual reality. But I think augmented reality, once that hits and you have a normal pair of glasses, good-looking kind of normal glasses, not anything that's super thick or anything like that and that can last all day long but can project holograms into the world, then you'll be able to do a version of your show where your hologram can just show up on my couch right here and you can hand me the phone and I can kind of take the phone as a hologram and play with it like that. One kind of trippy thing that I think about that's further out is once we have really good, mature AR glasses,

we won't even necessarily need other kinds of screens anymore, right? Things like TVs, you know, tablets, all these things could just be digital holograms and could be apps that, you know, some kid halfway across the world in some other place makes. And you'll be able to get completely new designs for things like TVs in different kinds of shapes that are not like the regular thing that Samsung can make in their factory. And I think that there's just going to be a crazy amount of creativity that gets unlocked in a lot of innovation when a lot of stuff that physically today has to be produced in a factory,

which obviously most people don't have access to doing that, can just get turned into an app that can be a hologram that you can give to someone. I think that that's gonna be wild. So I'm really excited about it, and that's why we're just so focused on this, and we have thousands of people working on this at Facebook, because I just do think that this is gonna be

the next major computing platform, even if it takes several years to get there. Right. And so do you see like a world maybe where screens or displays are sort of a past where you literally can project with AR if the tech is good enough? You can just hold like a rock or whatever, like a very simple, inexpensive object and with your AR, turn it into a screen, if that makes sense? Yeah, I mean, I think you'll definitely be able to, you know, have your AR glasses and kind of scan an object and get kind of a hologram version of it. And kind of, it's, you know, I mean, the real thing will always have somewhat amount of more fidelity than you'll be able to get with

augmented. I mean, like haptics are one area where you want to feel something. You pick up a rock or an object and it kind of has more weight. That's kind of hard to model. But I do think we're going to get other senses through augmented and virtual reality that may not be possible in the physical world. So let's say, for example, I'm kind of feeling around on my desk and my hand is getting close to a water bottle.

Right, today you don't feel the water bottle until you touch it, but it's possible in AR or VR that we can provide some kind of sense. So as you start getting close to an object, you start feeling some kind of resistance or some sense that you're near something, which of course is how some other animals navigate the world through sonar

and different things like that, getting a sense of different. So I think it's gonna be pretty wild. I think a lot of new things are gonna be possible. It's not that it's gonna replace all physical things, of course not, a lot of things you still need to be physical, but a lot of different types of media, books, games, different things that people have, TVs,

it's not actually clear that in the future those all need to be physical objects anymore. I think a lot of them, if you're sitting next to me, your hologram is here with me, and maybe another friend is kind of sitting next to you on the couch hologrammed in from somewhere else, and we wanna play a game of cards, and I can just kind of snap,

and here's a virtual deck of cards and I can like hand them out right it's like I just think that that's going to be pretty wild um yeah so it's um you know one way that I think about this is like you know one superpower that I kind of felt like Spotify gave us was the ability to get access to the whole back catalog of of music anywhere you go. Right, it's like I used to have my CDs or whatever and it's like you had your the music that you like but now you can get access to everything and I think with with AR and VR it's almost like you're gonna be able to get access to kind of the whole catalogue of objects in the world just instantly. You'll be able to kind of snap your figure your fingers

and get a deck of cards like a board game whatever it is that you want to bring in and kind of have that there. I think that that's going to be really powerful. But there's obviously a lot more technology that we need to develop before we can get there. Gotcha. Yeah. See, this is why it was a good idea to talk to you, because I'm not I'm not thinking this far into the future. And now I'm like, OK, you got to address all of your senses, you know, your sense of sight, your sense of hearing. But also you can introduce new senses, which is sense of sight your sense of hearing but also you can introduce new senses which is kind of crazy bet mgm authorized gaming partner of the nba has your back all season long from tip-off to the final buzzer you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in vegas

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But here's a question I've been wondering about. It could go with AR or VR. What do you think is more important for people to adopt this tech? The actual quality of the tech and the experience itself, or the minimalization of the form factor? Because I'm thinking you mentioned earlier, like the glasses, maybe having like a thicker rim, but not too thick and being relatively unobstructive. Is that as important? Or do you, which do you focus on first? Well, I think it's a little different between virtual and augmented reality for virtual reality because a lot of people, you know You're doing it at home or you're kind of doing it in an area where you're

Where it's it's kind of reasonable to be fully immersive You know the way it looks is not I think the biggest factor, right? I think if we were talking about people walking down the street wearing a VR headset I think that would be a different situation but that kind of doesn't work you don't want to be fully immersed right in some other world where you're walking down the street that's where augmented reality comes in so for VR I think there are all these reasons why you want to get it smaller right you want to make it more portable of course you want to be more comfortable the lighter it is the the kind of more

comfortable it's gonna be for people to use. And of course, anything that people are going to use, you want to be cool. You want it to look cool. You care about how the headphones that you're using look. It's like you probably like the design of them. So it's something that matters. And that's something that we work on. For AR, I think there's going to be a completely new threshold.

Because that's meant to be worn and you're interacting with the world around you and just bringing holograms into the world. That I think has a very high bar for aesthetics and feeling like it's a normal pair of glasses. So if you think about the range of glasses on that from really thin-rimmed glasses to pretty thick-rimmed glasses, I don't know if we can cram all the electronics into a very thin-rimmed glasses anytime soon. But the goal is going to be to try to get all the electronics and things that we need to produce that into kind of a normal thick-rimmed pair of glasses. I think that that matters. But then in the meantime, for virtual reality, we just want to get it as light as possible.

So for Quest 2, the goal, we got it 10% lighter than Quest 1. We shaved off about 60 grams. And we made it so that it's not just lighter, it's also smaller. So the headset piece is smaller, but also the strap is a soft strap instead of the hard strap, which when it was a little heavier, you kind of needed a hard strap in order to make it so the weight distribution worked on your head and that the harder strap could kind of support that. But now that it's lighter, we crossed a threshold where you can get the soft strap. And then that has a double benefit because now the soft strap makes it a lot smaller. So I can just chuck it in my backpack when I'm on the go a lot more easily

and it makes it a lot more portable so it's functional. So I think that that kind of thing really matters and we're definitely gonna continue focusing on just smaller, faster processors, better screens until you get down to the retina displays and more affordable. I mean, that's another dimension that we haven't talked about is if we want to make this that it's something that... A really key thing about building social platforms is they're not single player games for the

most part, right? If you're trying to interact with someone, they also need to be able to have that device. And an important part of making that work is having it be affordable. So, you know, one of the things that we're really proud of with Quest 2 is in addition to all these innovations, right? Making it lighter and faster and kind of working on a whole new chip architecture

and getting the screen to be a lot sharper with 50% more pixels, we also were able to lower the price from $399 to $299, which I just think is going to make it possible for a lot more people to access that and get into VR. And that's something that I'm really excited about. That's a good point. Also, whenever I think about AR,

I think my brain naturally goes back to remembering Google Glass back in the day. And I'm curious, when you're thinking about the future of what you want AR to look like, do you ever look back at the past? Like, was Google Glass ahead of its time? Well, I think that the idea that you're going to want to have some information and context there, I think it makes sense to work on that. And I think that we'll see other types of glasses come out, I'd imagine. I don't know what Apple and others are working on.

But there's one version that the tech can take, which I think you can kind of think of as like a smartwatch on your face. So it's like, what do you use your smartwatch for? Notifications, maybe some information. And maybe you could have that in the corner of your eye. Would that be interesting? Yeah, I think that some people might like that. That's not personally the thing

that I'm super excited about building for a number of reasons. One is I come at this from the perspective of how do we connect people better? So having some kind of information in the corner of your eye is just not as powerful from my perspective as being able to have like hologram Marques here with me and being able to interact and kind of share objects or play a game physically together.

That I think is just like a completely different value proposition that's going to be harder to build, but I think is worth waiting for to get to that. So I think you'll kind of see different things. Google Last was sort of an early take on the kind of smartwatch on the face type of thing. And I don't know, I'm sure others will try that too. That's not the main thing that we're focused on trying to build. Gotcha. I love it. So I have a little have a little bit of a rapid fire, little, little this or that questions. And, uh, we'll see what you think. Okay. Uh, algorithmic or chronological. Ooh, well, I mean, I feel like I'm kind of the algorithmic guy. So, um, so it's, I mean, look, there's, there's a place for both. What we've found is that the vast majority of people prefer algorithmic because at the end of the day, there's just, you know, your friends post too much stuff.

And the pages you follow, the accounts you follow on Instagram, there's too much stuff. And at the end of the day, if your cousin or someone, you someone, if they have a baby or some milestone happens, it's like you just kind of expect that you're going to see that. And people get upset when they miss that because it was 40 posts down because it was in chronological order. So I think the ranking is more valuable. The other thing that we just found is that when we made the whole thing chronological, it basically encouraged people to spam, right? Because a lot of pages were like, oh, I could get to the top by just posting stuff really, really frequently. So I kind of think like having an option to see things chronological in a world where most pages expect that their content is going to have to be ranked

and therefore has to be good content is a valuable, is kind of a good balance. But having it go all chronological, I think kind of produces some bad effects. Got it. I feel like that's the level-headed algorithmic answer. I prefer good algorithmic to chronological. Favorite non-Facebook app? Well, I mean, these days I'm in Purple Air a lot, but I don't know if that's good.

I mean, that's because of the California wildfires. It's the air quality app. I think they built this whole network of, it's actually really cool how they have these devices and people can put them out outside their homes. And then they kind of all get aggregated in the cloud and you can look at a map of how the air quality is everywhere. So I've certainly been using that a lot. I mentioned Spotify earlier. I probably spend more time in Spotify than almost any other app. I like music a lot. I think Daniel is a great entrepreneur and a good person. And it's a good company. And I think they've just done a great job with their work. Big fan of Spotify.

All right, phone in your pocket right now. You know, I've been using Samsung phones for a few years, and I'm a big fan of them. And, you know, I think that they build great phones. I like Android. I also just think, you know, as someone who's building a company where, you know, billions of people around the world use our products, most of them use Android phones. So I think it's pretty good for me and for the management team of the company to have exposure to using different Android phones instead of all just having iPhones, which would probably be the default for a lot of folks. Interesting. That's a good answer. Speaking of Samsung phones,

folding phones, do you think folding phones have a real future? Well, I think it's interesting. It's an exciting innovation. And I think I've played around with one, the Samsung Fold for a bit, and I liked it. I do think we will need to get to the point where they're a bit thinner before they get very wide adoption. But the other thing that I think is interesting are the clamshell phones, because, you know, I mean, I always just think about this stuff from the perspective of connecting and communicating.

And, you know, there's a ton of video chat happening now, especially with COVID and, you know, people needing to connect and not being able to, you know, see's a ton of video chat happening now, especially with COVID and people needing to connect and not being able to see other people in person. And you can do it on your computer, but holding a phone in front of you for a long period of time can get sort of tiring. And a lot of people do it. I mean, way more people do kind of phone video chat than have video chat calls or anything like that by quite a large margin.

But having a clamshell phone where you can basically easily seat it down on a table and kind of fold it over so that way the camera's pointing at you and you can kind of see the video in the top half of the phone screen I think could be pretty neat. So I mean I guess you could do that with the sideways folding ones too.

But I think there's something to this. I think in the V1 devices, I'm not sure if they've quite cracked exactly the form factor yet, but I bet that there's something there. Yeah, that's what I keep saying. Generation 1 is everyone feeling it out, figuring out what angle they want to come from. Generation 2 is where it gets interesting because they can narrow in on what worked well. i'm sure they'll take your your feedback as well if you give if you offer it to them uh last one crap take re-smoked barbecue or sweet baby rays i mean is that even a question it's uh i mean i think it's it's well known in on the internet that i am a Sweet Baby Ray's fan. Fair. I like barbecuing and I guess I'm a Sweet Baby Ray's fan boy.

That's fair. Fair to say. Mark, thanks for joining me. I appreciate the time. I know you're a busy guy, so taking the minutes to spend with me was appreciated and hopefully I'll take all this new knowledge about the future of VR and AR with me. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All

right. So that's it. That's talking tech with Mark Zuckerberg. Hopefully we can call it a part one, we would love to get to do it again sometime. There's a ton of topics we always want to talk about with people like that. But otherwise, back to the regular scheduled podcast on Friday. See you guys there.