mark zuckerberg critical thinking

Mark Zuckerberg Leadership Style & Principles

• 2020-11-25 18:33:41
• 19 minute(s)

Mark Zuckerberg Leadership Style & Principles

H ow could we define the leadership style and principles of Mark Zuckerberg? How do Mark Zuckerberg lead his teams on a daily basis? What can we learn from his leadership?

Mark Zuckerberg illustrates the transformational leadership style in action.

He is described as encouraging and aggressive . A person who always demands constant innovation and growth, he loves debates and challenges.

Mark Zuckerberg proved to the world that leadership has nothing to do with age and experience.

He has become a symbol of hope, a role model, and inspiration for youth internationally. He broke the traditional barriers and dreamt big and succeeded as the world’s youngest billionaire.

Mark Zuckerberg is probably one of the most beloved leaders in the business world.

Important Like him or hate him, you’ve got to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg—there’s no denying that, at a mere 30 years old, he’s a multibillion-dollar success. And with a whopping 99% approval rating from his employees, he seems to be more of a superhero than a regular boss.

Every manager, a team leader or a decision-maker would like to be seen as a great leader. Looking at Mark Zuckerberg qualities, it might seem to be the simplest thing ever.

How did he become a people magnet like that? What separates him from other corporate leaders? What’s his secret to being one of the most popular and admired leaders in the world? Here are the qualities of a good leader that we can learn from Mark Zuckerberg and his leadership style.

Think Different

Don't chase money, be a critical thinker, choose the right people, train your equanimity, mistakes are opportunities, make a dent in the universe.

F acebook exists because Mark Zuckerberg had a vision for it. Yes, he was a talented coder, but his vision differentiated him from others with the same skill set. With his programming skills as the basis, he built an online platform for people to connect with each other.

Good leaders are unconventional, because straying from convention creates the unexpected. And Zuckerberg is certainly that.

Eschewing standard corporation politics, he established the “ Hacker Way ,” which reminds employees that the best idea and implementation should always win—not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To be a good leader, to go places, you must be willing to go further than others have and do things others won’t.

He worked his ass off , did things he was uncomfortable with (like travelling across continents to speak to audiences about his vision) and did what had to be done to build his company.

Zuck's said

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough. — Mark Zuckerberg Click To Tweet

Leaders need to play out of their comfort zone in order to make a mark for themselves. Mark Zuckerberg always tried to leave his comfort zone behind and made decisions that looked odd.

Important Over the years, we have seen that those decisions that look odd actually turned out to be pretty well for him and his company. Taking calculated risks is one of the tactics so that you know you are on top of your game and without leaving any stone unturned.

Keep in mind that everything is possible in this world.

There are innumerable opportunities in this cut-throat competitive world . The only thing you must do is to look at the door that is opened rather than the one that is closed.

In an interview, Zuck shared that during his college days, he would spend several hours programming every night. Half of the things he did, he did not even release. He would just show them to a bunch of his friends and then move on to another project.

Do you have a vision for a better team, organization, world? What excites you? What drives you?

Important These are some key questions to ask yourself as a leader. Visionary leaders are those who have a passion and purpose, and are motivated to bring their vision to life.

Great leaders are those who follow the road that is less traveled.

If you get into a conventional route that is cluttered with the competition, you get into the rat race and end up nowhere. In contrast, if you follow an unconventional path that is unexplored and untested , you will come out with something new and leave a mark behind for others to follow you.

📚 Additional reading

Even if you never completely leave your box—after all, you have to specialize in something—constantly push against its walls and redefine its limits.

• Five Effective Ways To Think Outside The Box
• Five Ways To Boost Your Creativity
• Here is Why Competitors are Losers

R ight from the beginning, the frugal-living Mark Zuckerberg was never in it for the money. He had a larger vision and not only thought ahead of where he wanted to take Facebook, but pushed himself and his team to put all their creativity into their work.

Don’t chase money but chase your passion to enable the money to run behind you.

Research shows that those who chased money and acquired could not enjoy their lives as they reached their saturation point quickly and found nothing beyond. However, those who followed their passions struggled initially but made good money and lived their lives fully.

His life’s ambition is to create a more open and connected world and his commitment to that goal is unwavering. Money is just a tool for him.

Important Mark’s main motivations are pretty clearly based around materially changing the world and building technology that was used by everyone on the planet. If he had to choose, he’d rather be the most influential person in the world rather than the richest.

I’m here to build something for the long-term. Anything else is a distraction. — Mark Zuckerberg Click To Tweet

Facebook doesn’t build services to make money; it makes money to build better services.

His distaste for financials concerns is also obvious in the way he’s set up the company. Sheryl Sandberg’s title may be COO, but she’s essentially the CEO of the company’s business side , running the entire sales and monetization operation on her own.

You can’t sell what you don’t believe in, and Facebook’s creator believes in the product, which cultivates in his employees the unwavering confidence and support that leads to success.

And all of that is reflected in the fact that the company’s mission, “ to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected ,” is the same today as it was ten years ago.

In 2013 he donated 18 million shares of Facebook stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and became the biggest donor of 2013.  In 2015 he and his wife Priscilla had opened “Chan Zuckerberg Initiative”, a program promoting equal opportunity and promised to give away 99% of their Facebook shares during their lives.

Don’t chase money, chase great leaders. As I’m fond of saying: People leave managers, not companies.

Important Meaning that the manager-employee relationship is so central and important that it’s often the determining factor in one’s experience of work. A good leader can make a bad job tolerable but a bad leader can make a good job a misery.

Money isn’t a motivator. Believe it or not, when it comes to employee motivation, money isn’t as important as you might think.

Sure, you need to pay your employees fairly and competitively. But once you pay competitively, it’s not wages that keep your employees going above and beyond every day, it’s something else. 

When you are chasing your dreams, money should not be the only thing on your mind. Instead, you need to be chasing your vision so that you get the wanted results. When you have the vision and the goal, money will eventually follow you.

• Why Chasing Money Is a Bad Deal
• Sheryl Sandberg – Leadership Style & Principles

M ark Zuckerberg has noted his interest in always going deeper with an issue or idea in order to really make a difference, be disruptive and maximize the value.

Effective leaders adapt to situations quickly and know how to face criticism.

When he faced growing criticism over privacy allegations, Mark Zuckerberg caved in to public opinion, giving users more control over their privacy. He learned quickly how much user experience mattered and adapted his decisions to be more inclusive of them.

Willing to face criticism and taking the blame in case of adverse situations is one aspect that isn’t the part of everyone’s personality.

Important But Mark Zuckerberg is different as he always tried to lead his company from the front and make sure he was there when people started pointing fingers towards Facebook or any affiliated company. This happened when the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the company hard.

Instead of building walls, we can help build bridges. — Mark Zuckerberg Click To Tweet

Critical thinking enables leaders to understand the impact of their decisions on the business as a whole and ensures both alignment with organizational goals and accountability for results.

Important Critical thinking is the use of cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed — the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions.

Critical thinking is the ability to deal with the contradictions and problems of a tumultuous environment in a reasoned, purposeful, productive way. 

Decisions are made using an approach that is fair, objective, accurate and based on information that is relevant to the situation.

Being a critical thinker is to question assumptions. After all, sometimes, conventional wisdom can be wrong. When Uber first launched, everyone said the government would never allow it to remain in business because their fleet were effectively unlicensed taxis. Yet now they’re a fixture in cities across the world.

Leaders who engage in critical thinking also understand the total organization and how the individual parts work together.

It is one thing to understand one’s role as a leader. It is altogether another thing to understand how to set direction and directly affect the outcomes.

In today’s fast-changing and highly competitive business environment, the risks of poor decisions are greater than ever.

Leaders have to make decisions about their organization’s strategic direction, competitive positioning and proper allocation of resources. When poor decisions are made an organization may compromise their reputation and miss critical opportunities.

Critical thinking is applicable whenever need arises to resolve a challenge. It is the kind of thinking that makes desirable business outcomes more likely.

• How To Think And Solve Problems Like Elon Musk
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F rom someone who had few friends (as portrayed in The Social Network), to hobnobbing with the likes of Peter Thiel and Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg has, from the start, built connections and relationships with the bigwigs of Silicon Valley.

If you believe that you are the sum of the people you are closest to, then Mark Zuckerberg is certainly in very good company.

In the same way, he knew that he needed to surround himself with the right people in order to bring his vision to life. When Facebook was first launched, he partnered with roommates and friends who believed in the project and had skills that would complement his technical background.

As Facebook expanded, Mark Zuckerberg continued this same strategy of partnering with people who are similarly passionate about his vision.

Hiring Sheryl Sandberg, who was Facebook’s COO, was one such move which has propelled Facebook’s growth. Zuckerberg has the imagination, and he can trust Sandberg to execute his ideas.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed. — Mark Zuckerberg Click To Tweet

You will want to develop smart hiring strategies consistent with your cultural values to bring the right people on board.

Important The right people are not those who have the right competency but those who have the right attitude . Some of the most successful businesses have a nontraditional, strengths-based approach to hiring — hire the best talent first, then worry about finding the right role for them.

When it comes to hiring new talent at Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg uses a rule that is simple and straightforward: Don’t hire someone you wouldn’t work for yourself.

That mentality can even separate successful companies from failures, according to the 34-year-old billionaire. If you wouldn’t work for the candidate sitting across the table from you, then hiring them won’t help your company advance.

Zuck gives out perks and as a leader you should do the same: It is hard to bash a boss who provides free lunches and a relaxed work environment. Being able to de-stress without leaving your workplace is a luxury that not many employees have.

Mark Zuckerberg is well known for his leadership ability, and a big part of this is hiring the right team to help the business reach its goals.

Whether you are looking to fill developer roles or someone to code your new software, you should surround yourself with the highest quality talent that is going to be committed to achieving your vision for the future.

If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room. The idea that you are who you surround yourself with has lasted this long because it’s true — and you can use it to achieve your dreams in business and in life.

• Five Ways To Hire The Best Talent
• Seven Ways Great Leaders Attract The Best Talent Like a Magnet
• Tricky Interview Questions You Might Not Answer

T his is a fancy way of saying that Zuckerberg doesn’t lose his cool when he’s under pressure. Instead, he calmly approaches even the most difficult situations because anger doesn’t breed success — it only serves to alienate or give the impression that someone feels they don’t have control over a situation.

As a leader, Zuck is someone who doesn’t lose his cool easily, no matter how stressful the situation becomes. He can take a lot of pressure and talks normally.

There were many times when his company’s inside situation was a mess, and everyone was panicked. But he controlled everything maturely with a gentle and calm approach.

Your management style sets the tone for your team in terms of how you lead and the results you will yield as a group.

Important If you are calm-assertive type , you have a very clear idea of the procedures in place to get things done and are able to communicate those expectations with a cool, collected and level head.

You don’t let people deter you. That’s how you do it. — Mark Zuckerberg Click To Tweet

Calm leaders inspire more trust and perform better. And that goes a long way to inspiring trust and loyalty. 

Important Leaders who are calm instead of impulsive are more likely to inspire trust or loyalty because their employees know where they stand with them. They know that no matter the issue, they can rely on their leaders to find a way forward without losing their cool.

Having the ability to remain calm under all circumstances is a powerful tool to have in your management toolbox.

It will inspire your people to trust you more while at the same time improving your ability to make better decisions and think more clearly under pressure. And this will stand your management career in good stead.

Having a regular mindfulness meditation practice can help an individual get in touch with their emotions and become aware when they might be disturbed or angry. Mindfulness can help us improve our emotional intelligence, which allows us to understand another person’s perspective and be more sympathetic to their needs and concerns.

Calm leaders see the big picture. Calm leaders are not rocked by every disruption that comes along.

Short-sightedness tends to fuel the insecurities in people. A calm leader can exude confidence because they see the big picture and it’s with that understanding they can lead with a steady hand.

Calm leaders bring stability.

They bring a level of maturity and stability that is often lacking during turbulent times. They know that their actions, attitudes, reactions, and thinking go a long way in determining successful outcomes.

Leadership is difficult and comes with a certain amount of pressure built in. The leaders who are most effective are those who know how to deal with pressure in healthy and productive way.

• Mindful Leadership 101
• Seven Ways Great Leaders Manage Through Chaos

G ood leaders recognize that they are not infallible. They make mistakes; they learn from them. They listen to criticism; they grow from it. Even early in his career, Zuckerberg proved true to both of these.

From the privacy fiasco to the newsfeed, Zuckerberg was willing to take risks, and often had to backtrack on changes that did not work.

But that did not dampen his appetite for innovation and part of Facebook’s philosophy is to innovate, so we can safely assume that he will continue to do things that don’t always go down well with some of its users.

The traits of great leaders are not just that they make great strides they come up with decisions that can help their companies get to new heights.

Important They also make mistakes, and some of them can cost their company daily. But they have regards to admit them wholeheartedly and try to resolve the matter which they have to deal with after the mistake has happened.

So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. — Mark Zuckerberg Click To Tweet

Zuck is not interested in following or doing things on other people’s terms. He knows how to take risks.

As he noted in a Wired Magazine interview, “Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.” Success doesn’t come from worrying about how something will work; instead, you just have to jump in and do it.

Admitting your mistakes is the fastest path to moving past them.

When you admit your mistake , it allows everyone to focus on finding a solution, rather than focusing on the problem. By being upfront, you’re cutting the blame game short, and freeing up everyone’s time and energy to help troubleshoot.

Mark Zuckerberg is well-known from the surprising (shocking, for some people) decisions he made in the past. Before he went to Harvard, he built a program that was learning your music taste. Microsoft wanted to buy it for $1 million, and you know what?  Zuck turned them down!

Beware of your blind spots. Instead of insisting on being right or blaming others for an error, leaders should consider alternative viewpoints, even if it contradicts their beliefs.

Important When we’re assessing a situation, we have to make an effort to make sure there aren’t any gaps in our thinking. Leaders should take time to clarify what actually happened by asking the people they’re working with to share their recollection of events.

A growth mindset is the belief that we can always develop our abilities further.

The growth mindsets don’t view failure as a confirmation of their immutable abilities , but rather opportunities to learn and grow from the experience. Thus, the growth mindsets don’t shy away from experiences where they may not succeed because it’s all part of their self-development continuum.

Everyone makes mistakes, even those in leadership positions; perhaps even more so because you’re responsible for making decisions.

• How To Fix a Broken Mindset

I n recent years, Mark Zuckerberg has become more involved in shaping the global business landscape, illustrating that he is more than just a one-hit wonder.

His vision was that of a more open and connected world and his commitment to that goal is unwavering.

And throughout the growth of Facebook, he has stuck to his vision of a product that offers value while connecting people and building a world with more empathy.

Goals keep you aligned and focused.  It helps you manage your time.

Important It helps you remove negative thoughts and fill your mind with positive thoughts. It holds your dreams high. Above all, it enhances your longevity.

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. — Mark Zuckerberg Click To Tweet

Make a difference in the lives of others as it gives you greater satisfaction apart from living beyond your lifetime.

Mark Zuckerberg has made a difference in the lives of others through his technology and philanthropic activities . Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was built to accomplish a social mission.

Have a dream and work on it.

Important Don’t get distracted from your dreams and by criticism. Stick to it and you will soon see yourself on the top of the world. Mark Zuckerberg had a dream and accomplished it.

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t shy away from using any software, or even it is a very basic type of tool to enhance the daily operations or the Facebook app. That’s why Facebook always remained one step ahead of its competitors throughout the last decade.

To be a good leader, you first need to be true to yourself and have passion. You can’t sell what you don’t believe in.

Continually in the pursuit of the next cool thing, Zuckerberg proves he believes in his goals and is passionate about what innovation can do for his product. And it’s worked.

Having a leader that is directed at an unambiguous goal gives employees something to strike towards. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg remains so deeply involved with the vision of Facebook demonstrates that he legitimately wants to change the world. It is hard to be more genuine than that.

• How Leaders Are Driving Change
• How Great Leaders Inspire And Motivate Their Team

Final Thoughts

D espite years of positive and negative press, Mark Zuckerberg has maintained focus on his goals, steadily moving his business to even newer possibilities and raising the leadership bar ever higher.

Altering your own thinking, behaviors and actions can help you deliver positive results.

Important As soon as you remember that qualities of a good leader have to be implemented in your daily routine, you will be able to work on becoming a better version of yourself, and you won’t ask yourself how to be a good boss anymore.

One of the great things about great leaders is that they make it look easy. It actually takes courage, self-confidence and persistence.

Great leaders want to be great leaders and are willing to do what it takes to get there. And that’s an aspiration that anyone can take on.

Leadership is the quality that will bring the best out of the people around you.

Important You are the leader and everyone around you will look to you for guidance when things get rough. It is crucial that you keep your composure at the toughest of times.

Thanks to his quality and exceptional leadership skills, Mark Zuckerberg has made his dream come true. Now, It’s your turn!

Behind a successful story, there is a powerful figure with a great vision and great leadership skills. One thing for sure, learning about some of his leadership lessons can be very helpful and inspiring. If you want to offer your valuable feedback for this blog or want to ask any questions, please use the comments section below.

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How Mark Zuckerberg Thinks

Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder, chairperson and CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., formerly Facebook, Inc., the largest global social network. In Q2, 2021, Facebook had approximately 2.89 billion monthly active users.  Since 2010, Time magazine has ranked Zuckerberg among the 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world in its Person of the Year. However, Zuckerberg has been under fire, defending questionable privacy practices at Facebook. His private emails may be reviewed as part of an extensive US government antitrust  investigation.

So how does this extraordinary entrepreneur think?  I analyzed the thinking he displayed during Facebook’s 2013, 2014, and 2015 first quarter earnings conference calls.  I then rated his commentary according to our Hierarchy of Thinking Styles .

The analysis revealed predominantly moderate positive thinking and extraordinary positive thinking, supported by Optimal Thinking.

As the leader of a networking company, Zuckerberg skillfully uses the language of connection: moderate positive thinking. He deploys moderate positive thinking to express his appreciation to Facebook employees for their support and hard work. Zuckerberg uses moderate positive thinking to describe the stability of the organization. He deploys extraordinary positive thinking to articulate innovation and progress.

His moderate positive thinking is particularly effective in presenting information with reasonable self-confidence.  He uses words like “increasing”, “improvement”, “better”, and  “normally”.  He also uses phrases such as “good sign”, “good quarter”, “pretty meaningful”, “building the knowledge economy”, “strategy of improving quality” and “improving the world through sharing”.

However, Zuckerberg is clearly a “big picture” person who welcomes change.  He deploys extraordinary positive thinking effortlessly to articulate Facebook’s focus on innovation and product differentiation. He is not deterred by obstacles and roadblocks that obstruct progress. Time and again, he cites metrics that rise above the status quo and predefined limitations.

Zuckerberg uses extraordinary positive thinking to articulate unusual beliefs, new processes, remarkable resources, and outstanding results. He uses words like “innovate”, “improvement”, “new”, and  “amazing”.  He also uses phrases such as “great progress”, “big fundamental believer”, “very big contributors”, “amazing journey”, “growing environmental consciousness”, and  “talent management processes”.

Last year was a big year for us here. We started off the year with no ads at all on mobile and we ended up with approximately 23% of our ads revenue coming from mobile in the fourth quarter. That’s a pretty amazing change.

Keep in mind, this analysis provides a snapshot of Mark Zuckerberg’s thinking process in one specific context.

How Mark Zuckerberg Uses Optimal Thinking

Optimal Thinking is the realistic style of thinking that empowers individuals, teams, departments, and entire organizations to be their best.

Like other successful CEOs, Zuckerberg employs Optimal Thinking to define Facebook’s values, standards, and direction.

.. another which is focused on kind of efficiency and helping people to get the most value out of each moment that they’re spending in Facebook. And then the fourth group is our core business, which is focused on helping people to see the best ads and basically make the most money per moment that people are spending at the lowest cost in most efficiency in terms of serving people..     Mobile is the perfect device for Facebook for three reasons

Zuckerberg displays personal and organizational maturity by frequently referring to ongoing “tests” to quantify and qualify optimization initiatives. Recognizing that optimization is synonymous with completion, his focus is on getting things right.

We just have to do it right… to get the right content to the right people..    that this is the right path going forward as well..

Want to Put Optimal Thinking to the Test?

If you are a CEO, senior executive or rising star who is facing a challenge, Optimal Thinking Executive Coaching will give you the best chance of achieving immediate victory and ongoing success.  With Optimal thinking, you will experience peak performance while dealing with any challenge.

Test Drive Optimal Thinking

The transcripts used in this article are © SeekingAlpha.com. 2013, 2014, 2015.

Read my analysis  “ How Howard Schultz Thinks ” (Interim and former CEO of Starbucks, Inc.) as part of the “ How CEO’s Think ™” Optimal Thinking article series.

If you would like to nominate a well-known leader for a thinking analysis, feel free to include them in your comments below.

9 Responses to “How Mark Zuckerberg Thinks”

Great article. Great ideas are never conceived by mediocre minds. Zuck is a man of action.

Zuckerberg needs to do more to assuage advertisers that Facebook is alert to hate speech as well as isn’t aunilateral censor. Love your posts and have followed you for years. I constantly use your 100-day optimal thinking audio program to keep me on the optimization track.

Brilliant analysis. Thanks.

Great analysis of Zuckerberg. It will be interesting to see how he deals with the anti-trust investigations coming Facebook’s way.

This is a really helpful piece of information. I am happy that you took the time to share this info about Mark Zuckerberg. Please keep us up to date with his activities. Thanks again for sharing.

Zuckerberg achieved success by stealing intellectual property from his college mates. I guess that was his extraordinary negative thinking at work. Your articles are fascinating. Thanks.

Zuckerberg has become more moderate over the years. At the beginning, he was just out of the box. I was fascinated by your analysis and look forward to reading more as you do them.

I’ve been following your CEO thinking pos’s for several weeKS and have learned a lot from you. Have you considered analyzing Jamie Dimon’s thinking?

Great series of posts. Zuckerberg appears to use moderate positive thinking to gain rapport, extraordinary positive thinking to differentiate Facebook’s products and services. Optimal thinking appears to serve as the foundation for all the above. Very, very interesting stuff. I am going to take your assessment.

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

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Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Mark Zuckerberg ( FB / IG ), the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta , which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse—moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.

Mark is also the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with his wife Priscilla, which is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges—including supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the twenty-first century.

Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California, in 2004.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, thanks for having me on. I’m looking forward to this.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: This is probably one of the more interesting places to start an interview that I’ve ever done. I fenced competitively when I was in high school. It’s not something I did since I was like a little kid or something like that. But I’ve always loved sports and just being active. I like problems that you can solve intellectually, but I also just think managing your energy and being out there and being physical, it’s just always been a really important part of my life. So I was looking for a sport that would do this in the winter in high school. 

I did a bunch of running. So I did cross country, and I did tennis as well. So I started doing fencing. And I didn’t do it competitively for a super long period of time, but the thing that I loved about it is it’s obviously very physical and cardio taxing, just being on your feet and bouncing around. But it’s also very, very mental. I have these memories when I was in my high school chemistry classes of writing out sequences of moves that I wanted to try when I was doing bouts later after school that day and different things that you can do to win in multiple ways.

Basically, try to catch people off guard in one position. It’s like, “Okay, if they do power you, then you’re still in a better position. You can get them on the left or something.” Or if they don’t, then you get the touch. I found it to be a very intellectual, but a good sport. I was never that good at it. I did it competitively. Went to some state competitions and stuff like that. But I don’t think I would’ve been good enough to do it at college, for example. But mostly, it’s a fun thing to do.

Tim Ferriss: So the closest experience that I have is with kendo. I lived in Japan for a period of time, and I did some kendo. I think it shares quite a bit in common with fencing. Of course, the techniques are quite different. The slashing movements predominate in kendo. Although you are allowed to stab to the throat if you’re past a certain age, which is all a separate matter. But the idea of, as they might say in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, this sort of position before submission is an interesting one, right? So even if your first attempt fails, you’re in a superior position to execute on your next move.

It’s always struck me that as much as people think of you as someone who studies or even predicts or looks at trend lines into the future, it seems like you have quite a background in studying the past. And that’s where I wanted to go next, which was classics. It seems like you’ve spent quite a bit of time studying classics. I was wondering if there are any books or any figures who stick out to you from that chapter in your life? Maybe that chapter continues to this day, but if you could speak to that. I figured we’ll use that as a segue to other things.

Mark Zuckerberg: I loved classics. I picked it up in high school as well. I started studying Latin because I was so bad at speaking French and Spanish. I’m very interested in languages overall, but the whole kind of thinking on your feet and understanding really quickly. I process things more methodically. Latin was more my style because you don’t have to speak it. You can just read it at whatever kind of pace makes sense. And then from there I got into Greek. I actually thought that when I went to college, my plan was to be a classics major.

It turned out I took no classics courses at Harvard. I ended up doing psychology and computer science were the two areas that I focused on, but I just loved the discipline of classics so much and the history. I mean, philosophically, it is sort of the underpinning of, kind of, Western thought. I think it’s super interesting. But I’ve also just been very interested in basically people who shape the way we live. 

So the historical figures who I like learning about—I’d say there’s like a set of people like inventors—you know, people who just create things and change the world through that. But I’m also very interested in historical figures who try to invent or usher in new ways for people to live. So I always thought Augustus was a very interesting historical figure. And I mean, one of the things—I mean, he’s controversial for a lot of reasons, and you can debate all the good and bad, but one of the things I thought was just really always stuck with me about what he did was when he basically stopped the wars, at the time in history, there wasn’t really a concept of perpetual peace. 

The concept of peace that they had at the time was like this is just the temporary period during which your enemies are too weak to fight you, but they’re going to come back. And he basically ushered in this notion of actually trying to convert a lot of the military towards other trades, because he’s like, “All right. No, we’re trying to be more peaceful. We want to build a more positive sum economy. Let’s do this in a way where we can get people doing more productive things.” I always thought that was just a really interesting historical thing.

And in some ways has parallels today to some of the work that I think is going on in the tech industry around the whole creator economy. If you just think about how many people today basically do jobs that they have to that they might not actually like that much, but they’re supporting themselves compared to where I think and hope that the world is going, which is just a much more robust creative economy where way more people can do things that are intellectually or physically interesting to them. And in doing so build up communities around that and have enough monetization and economy around that to support that.

That to me is the modern version of how do you upgrade the way that people live and work to fulfill human potential? I think there are a lot of interesting lessons from the past. I think you can also read into it too much, but I really enjoyed it when I studied it.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s a great book.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Just the only book. Not the only thing.

Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t think it has some kind of unique significance in my life, but I love science fiction. I mean, I have spent a lot of time reading that. I think it’s often a good way to understand what’s possible. In recent years, the last decade as I’ve gotten more into virtual and augmented reality, and actually starting to build some of these things more, I’ve certainly spent a lot of time reading the science fiction, going back and revisiting a bunch of the books around that. It’s really fascinating to me to see what people predict and what the sociological phenomena that people predict around this stuff as well.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: There’s some that are just classics around this, right? I mean, I think at this point, anyone who’s interested in this space would read Ready Player One and Snow Crash . I think Rainbow’s End is one that is maybe not as commonly cited, but I think is maybe the augmented reality sort of equivalent of some of the seminal works that talk about virtual reality.

One of the things that I think is pretty interesting about all of these is that they sort of posit that the world is in some sort of dystopian state. And that I think is very different from how I think about this. I think that there are all these reasons why it is very valuable for people to be able to be present in another place no matter what their situation is.

I laugh about this sometimes when— My family, we love going down to Kauai and it’s beautiful there, and we’ll be out there and I’ll— I love surfing. I love doing a lot of stuff, but I also love being in VR when I’m there too. So it’s obviously, that’s not some kind of dystopian thing. But I think that just if you look at equalizing opportunity across the world, you don’t have to be in some kind of dystopian situation to want to be present with another person who you care about or an opportunity that’s better in another place.

That to me always struck me as a very interesting theme of that science fiction. But in terms of exploring sociologically and technologically what’s going to happen, I’ve always found it pretty fascinating.

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, it’s hard. I don’t think that there’s just one way to do it. People are psychologically much more interested and capable of focusing on a long-term outcome when they feel secure in the near term. So when there’s a lot of near-term thrash or prospects don’t look good or the market is down overall, even if that’s not specific to your company, even if it’s a kind of broader thing, I think that definitely strains people’s time horizons.

But good leadership is you try to get people excited about where you’re going. You obviously can’t just ignore the short term. There’s a lot of stuff that we need to get done there. At this point, it’s a pretty big company. I mean, as one of our board members says, “We need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time,” which is probably a simplification.

But one of the things that I’ve personally learned over the last 18 years of running the company is—I remember when I was getting started, feeling like you weren’t understood kind of feels bad. I think that there’s a normal human impulse, which is you want to be understood. I think that’s partially why people want to express themselves and why communication is so important—people at some level have this intrinsic desire to be understood and belong and feel like they belong with the people around them.

Obviously, being in a state where something that you’re trying to do is fundamentally misunderstood or that people don’t believe in it, can be tough. But after going through a bunch of these cycles, I actually feel like I’ve trained myself to see it the opposite way, which is if I’m doing something that feels too well understood for too long, then I feel like I’m just being complacent. After I’ve gone through a bunch of these different cycles, whether it’s—you know, a lot of things that are just not controversial today, but at the time people thought were crazy. Taking the service initially from being a college website to not, buying Instagram or WhatsApp, which were billions of dollars for the acquisitions, but at the time people were like, “What?” I remember, I think it was—I don’t know if it was Jon Stewart or Colbert—but they did a segment that was making fun of the Instagram acquisition. It was like, “What? You bought Instagram for a billion dollars? Of money? Are you kidding?”

So I think some of these things, it’s like, you just— you kind of go through a bunch of these and you have the conviction to kind of push back on the world a little bit and say, “Okay. We’re going to get through this and come out 18 months, 24 months, with something that we believe in.” And after that happens a few times, you understand that could happen. Most people still will get more of these bets wrong than right.

I think it’s obviously very important to not get too overconfident with this. But at this point, I kind of feel like if people fully feel like they understand what we are as a company and what we’re doing, then I’m not pushing it hard enough. Now I’m at the point where, like, that feels bad to me.

So I want to push us into the zone, which is, “Okay, let’s constantly be doing something that can be doubted.” Because if we’re not, then what are we doing? We have this huge opportunity to be able to do exciting things and help invent things and create things for the world. If it’s obvious to everyone that we’re going to be able to do each of the things that we’re working on, then I don’t feel like we’re making the most of what we need to do. So I’m not sure that answers the original question around internally how do you get people through it, but I actually think a lot of this how do you get an organization of a hundred thousand people through something is about managing your own psychology and about managing your team’s psychology. 

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

Mark Zuckerberg: One of the things that I’ve always found is you can pretty much, I think, get an organization and a team through almost any challenge as long as you can maintain good cohesion.

It’s the external stuff that doesn’t bother me that much. People can criticize us. If they’re people I respect, I care a lot about that and want to make sure we do better, but it doesn’t make me not sleep at night. When our stock price goes down, that doesn’t make me not sleep at night. When there’s a new competitor, that doesn’t make me not sleep at night. If there’s an issue on my team and there isn’t good cohesion, then I’m not sleeping well until I resolve that.

It goes back to the very first thing we were talking about with fencing. It’s intellectual, and you’re managing your energy. But I think in order to get through these things and build big, long-term things, you need to take care of yourself and you need to take care of your core team. And basically in doing so, you can, I think, lead a pretty large organization through some pretty difficult times to do some pretty awesome stuff. But I think that it’s intellectual, it’s energy, and it’s about kind of training yourself to be uncomfortable.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: For my own psychology, the way that I try to manage this stuff is I wake up in the morning, and you get whatever emails you have of stuff that’s going on in the world. 

So it’s world events, it’s team events, whatever trends we’re seeing across our products. And often in there, there’s a fair amount of bad news. And new things that I need to absorb. One of the things I’ve found just for kind of managing myself is that if I try to just go straight into the day, almost every morning when I wake up and read through my emails and get the news, it’s almost like getting punched with sort of like a ton of new context. And it’s like, “Okay, I need to internalize this.”

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

So I’ve found that for my own performance is significantly better when I have something like that that’s meditative and physical and allows me to output some energy, and then I can come back in, and it’s almost like I’ll have subconsciously settled all of the news that have happened in the world, and it’s like, “Okay. Now, let’s go deal with it.” Now, obviously, if there’s something that’s really an emergency, I’m not going to go do a sport or something, I’ll go deal with it. And obviously part of life is you don’t always get to control your schedule. And that’s kind of how that goes, but when I compare how I do on the days when I get to have some time to soak that in, or to have an outlet versus just like jumping right in, I find I’m often stewing in bad news or something. And then I’m not as productive.

So that’s sort of my own personal way that I try to manage situations like this. But obviously, a key part of this is like having an awesome team, and it’s not primarily about me at this point. It’s a big company, and we have awesome people who are running all these different groups. So I get that what I’m saying kind of how I’ve worked out the system for myself isn’t necessarily something that would work for a lot of other people.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Maybe I’m not strong-willed enough or calm enough to just do straight up meditation. I actually need to put myself in a situation where it’s difficult to not focus on that thing. 

Part of this too—I mean, I do think managing energy is an interesting thing. I mean, some of the folks who I work with at the company, I think they say lovingly, but I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron, in that basically, they’re like, “You have this unending amount of energy to go work on something. And if you point that at any given team, you will just burn them.” But at the same time, it’s just kind of managing that. So that way I can manage my own energy and diffuse it well enough, so that way it’s like, okay, I have the thing that I’m focused on that day, and it’s really important to me that I can as often as possible manage my schedule so I can actually focus on the things that I’m naturally thinking about.

I just think the engagement that you get of having, like, an immediate feedback loop around thinking about something and then getting to go talk to the people who are working on this is so much better than going and scheduling a meeting that you’ll have three weeks later when— I mean, maybe the topic will still be important, but it’s not like what’s going on at that time. Getting that balance right, I think, is an important thing for sustainability for the organization as well.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure. We may come back to energy management. We’re going to touch a lot of subjects. We’re going to bounce from the professional to the personal and everything in between. Let’s touch on some things that are kind of top of mind or might be top of mind right now, because I certainly have a lot of questions related to, say, the metaverse and a longer term roadmap. We chatted briefly prior to this about engineering versus science problems.

I’d love to unpack that at some point, but let me ask a really specific question first, and that’s related to kinesthetic feedback and engagement, right? So one thing that struck me about Ready Player One , especially in the cinematic version, so the movie itself is that you have this incredible tactile environment where they’re grabbing objects and interacting with objects, feeling impact, and so on. But then you see them cut to an external shot of someone in a, say, trailer where they wouldn’t actually have that kind of feedback even though they have haptic suits in Ready Player One . What do you see as sort of the roadmap for that type of interactivity?

The more I thought about this, the more I realized, “Well, surface level stimulation may not be quite as immersive as people would hope for.” Do we need to wait for some type of Neuralink type of computer brain interface, where we’re actually stimulating the brain and not simulating, but actually producing, sort of, the perception of kinesthetic engagement? How do you think about the future of that type of hardware and interaction?

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

Then we got hands. And the first set of hands were basically controllers, but now you’re actually getting actual hand tracking with all 10 fingers being able to be tracked in real time. In the next version that’s coming out, we have sensors for your eyes, so you can make realistic eye contact with someone in virtual reality. And just thinking about to what extent you can do without some of this stuff. I mean, think about all the Zoom calls that you’ve been on over the last couple of years during COVID, there’s no real eye contact over a video conference. Because your cameras are in different places. 

Tim Ferriss: It’s simulated.

Mark Zuckerberg: And even without that it still gets you pretty far. So in VR today, adding realistic eye contact, each of these things, it’s like, you kind of almost don’t realize that you’re missing them. And then when you have them, you’re like, whoa, that’s a really core part of the human experience is being able to make eye contact and hold eye contact with someone and have that gaze.

So I think you’ll just add more things over time. More realistic expressions, more realistic avatars going from kind of cartoon and stylistic and fun to photo realistic and having that work. And then at some point, I think you will get haptics. And the way that we kind of think about haptic glove, for example, screens have resolutions, right? You think about how many pixels are on the screen. And you can actually think about haptics in your hand or anywhere else as basically also having a resolution. It’s like, how many pinpoints can it make across your hand, and your hand is super sensitive. So it can actually, your actual physical hand can have a very high amount of resolution for haptics. But when we first start getting haptics, they’re not going to have that high of resolution, but it’s still going to be amazing. And then every year they’re going to get better and better and better.

So I think that there’s quite a far roadmap on this, which is partially what makes it super exciting, right? It’s like, you can have a realistically, a 15-year roadmap of what is it going to take to deliver the kind of virtual reality presence that you want to be, you know, feel like you’re physically there with another person. At the same time, augmented reality is a whole separate set of problems because now you’re putting a hologram in the real world. So that’s kind of a similar thing there. But being able to just work on a project that’s a 15-year project, where there’s—a lot of it is an engineering problem that you just need to go build, but a lot of it is also unknown, right?

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

Tim Ferriss: I’d love to ask some more questions about metaverse and also the recent announcement related to Instagram and NFTs. Just to touch on that. And then we’re going to go back and fill in with some backstory and some family questions, if you’re open to that. As I’m looking at the metaverse and have been observing fairly closely Web3 developments and NFTs, and so on in the last handful of years, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about your long-term planning and then how you must think about sort of secondary effects, tertiary effects of these technological advances. And then I’ve also thought about, I think it was Andy Grove who had paired metrics. So he would have sort of a primary outcome metric that they were tracking. And then they would look for kind of correlated impacts that they could track that were undesirable or should be addressed in advance.

And I’ll give you an example. So playing with Oculus, I was very impressed with the technology because I used a very early, I don’t want to say prototype, but version years ago, and the advances are really tremendous. And I had an opportunity to chat with a friend of mine who, unbeknownst to me, at some point, and I’m blanking on the exact game title, but he was something like second in the world or third in the world in mini golf. And that was, I want to say a year, year and a half ago. Now, he’s not even in the top 500. So there’s clearly a large demand for this. The number of users is increasing rapidly and it’s still early. Right?

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: It’s really, really early. Now when I used the technology most recently—and I had several ligaments torn on my knee, so I had the experience of actually engaging with it, sitting on a couch, which was fascinating because it was my first time not mapping out sort of the playing area and walking around, so I actually had the ability to test it as somebody who’s sort of mobility restricted, which was amazing—when I came out of the experience, it took a while for my eyes and brain to readjust to sort of the depth perception of objects around me. And I was chatting with this friend, John, he said, “Oh, yeah, it takes about two to three months. And then you adjust completely to that.” And I’m wondering what types of societal changes, maybe physical adaptations, you are tracking as more and more people come online and begin to spend more and more time using, say, VR.

Mark Zuckerberg: The framework that you’re talking about, about having goals and metrics to track those goals and then countermetrics is a really important one that we basically encode into all of our teams across the company. They’re basically things that we think are good if we can enable more connection or more different things across the company, but then there are kind of countermetrics in all these areas that we’re tracking to make sure that we don’t exceed or don’t increase negative effects. 

For VR specifically, the biggest issue that people report is still this feeling of motion sickness. And the basic issue, just to kind of break it down, is your eye— Now eyes are not computers, but you can kind of think about it as a refresh rate. If something changes in the world, it’ll kind of take 5 to 10 milliseconds for different people, for you to sort of recognize that. And if you think about what’s technically happening with VR, basically, you have to render this whole world continuously. And if a person changes their head position or eye position, it expects the image to be different. But then by the time that their saccade is done, which is what it’s called, basically your kind of eye refocusing.

If we haven’t rendered correctly, what you would kind of expect to be in that space, then it creates this real feeling of discomfort over time. It’s not like you miss one frame, and you feel terrible, for most people. But it’s over time, if you’re not doing that efficiently, then that creates this feeling that, it creates like a—it’s a real physical feeling of discomfort. And this is partially why the early versions of the VR headsets needed to be plugged into a computer because in order to be able to render a world that quickly, you needed a lot of computing power. So it’s this tremendous engineering challenge to now be able to do that so much more efficiently that you’re doing that on a mobile chip, which is 1/50th or 1/100th as powerful as the desktop things, but get that to work really well.

I would say that that problem is not fully solved yet, but it’s getting better in every generation, and people aren’t computers and not everyone is the same and people have different sensitivity to this stuff. So some people, if a headset is running at 60 frames per second, that won’t bother them. But other people, at the other end of the spectrum, if a headset is running at 120 frames per second, they may still perceive some glitchiness. And for most people, if you can get to 72 or 90, you’re in pretty good shape. But there are outliers and people are not all the same. And at the end of the day, making this a technology that can be comfortable for basically everyone is going to be a really critical part of making this happen.

So that’s probably the biggest effect that we see. Some of the other stuff, like you mentioned, I think you just need some more kind of a longitudinal study. 

Tim Ferriss: Right.

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s tough to exactly understand all the effects of anything right up front, but you want to be mindful of that and be open to the fact that what you’re doing could have issues and that you want to improve those issues. And we try to research that stuff and try to continuously improve it. But that’s the biggest thing that we’re tracking right now.

Tim Ferriss: And on looking at societal changes, we could look at that for a second and then we’ll come back to Instagram. I’ve been very engaged in watching, say, Axie Infinity as an example, and play to earn in different forms. And it’s been pretty mind boggling to see, for instance, that there are so many players in the Philippines who are earning income, that they can now impact large elections, as a constituent. And I’m wondering how you see this developing, and this is—certainly, Meta is going to be a primary player; there are going to be other players—but if we get to the point where—and please poke holes in this if you have a different view of things—but if we get to a point where there’s almost a universal basic income provided by the broad spectrum of jobs that you can have in the metaverse or online, what do you think some of the societal effects will be of that? It seems to be certainly growing faster than I ever could have imagined, even though a lot of it is maybe not right in my backyard. But it’s certainly on a global level, seems to be expanding really quickly. I’d love to hear you speak to that in any capacity.

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

And then there’s the question there of, okay, well, how do you govern that? Who gets to say, and what policies, who can enter it, how do taxes work, what’s the basic business model of that space, what are the design codes around what are you allowed to build there? All these different dimensions. And the physical world is, there’s a lot of it, but it is at the end of the day more finite than what we’re going to have with the virtual world. So not everyone can kind of get to be the mayor of their own virtual space and see how that evolves. But I think part of what we’re going to get to see is you’re going to have, you know, they could be young people in the Philippines or anywhere else around the world, experimenting with basically creating worlds that are not just a single space or an experience but actually like an environment or a polity in a way that other people can kind of be a part of.

And I think that there will be sort of pretty interesting innovation, social—and economic, and governance innovation—as long as this gets designed in a good way. So I guess more than any specific policy idea, I think this could end up being a way to basically explore a lot of different ideas and kind of see which of these different environments that evolve are going to be appealing to people in different ways. I think that’s going to be wild to watch play out. And it’s one of the things that I’m really looking forward to.

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

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

It’s like, we’re doing this podcast and we’re not sitting next to each other physically, but it feels like we’re here, and we’re kind of having a live conversation. And in the future, maybe five years from now, if we were doing this, we’ll have AR glasses and a hologram version of me will be on the couch next to you. And I think that will be even better than what we’re doing right now. So I think that through video chat, you can have moments where you feel present, but I think through things like virtual and augmented reality, when you can have an office and someone can be walking through it as a hologram, even though they’re physically in a different place. I think that you’ll just be able to much more naturally unlock more of the opportunities, both social and economic, and I guess other others as well, of being able to be around people and be present no matter where you actually are.

So people will be free to kind of live where they want, maybe where their family physically is, a country that they grew up in. But they’ll have all the opportunities that will be available around the world. So that I think is awesome. I think it’s one of the most promising things about the future. And one of the things that I’m trying to do is, sort of taking the conversation in a different direction, is we actually recently did this exercise at our company where we were thinking about, okay, we’re coming up on almost a hundred thousand people soon in our company. And we kind of think about our values as a company, as our cultural operating system. How do we get work done well and continue to build the things that we need to build. And a big part of the values, and I’d love to talk through them here—this is actually the first podcast or any public thing that I’ve done where I’ve discussed any of the values. I think it’ll probably be pretty interesting to go through it—but one of them is we rolled out this value called Live in the Future, which is basically about the world is moving towards being distributed first. And both because we think that’s a good trend for how we work, and because we aspire to play a role in building all the technology to enable that through virtual reality, augmented reality, metaverse, software, and infrastructure, and avatars to express yourself, we have the saying that we want people inside the company to eat your own dog food, that use the things that we are building internally as part of how we work, because that’s also, it gets us in a faster feedback loop to make those tools better for everyone else around the world. But that’s one of the six values that we just rolled out. I actually think it might be interesting to go through the others too, but up to you.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please. Please, let’s go through them, and then I’ll have some questions about them. I’m sure.

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s keep going. Let’s do it. Yeah.

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

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

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

A lot of the metaverse work to me has that level of inspiration and that’s partially why I find it super exciting. We talked about Live in the Future. That’s mostly focused on being a great distributed workforce. From the early days of COVID, I sort of tried to put a flag in the ground that we were going to, even after COVID is done, I think by the end of this decade, hopefully have 50 percent or more of the company working distributed and working remotely. And I still think that that will be awesome and just unlock opportunity, get access to more talent. And then the last two, Be Direct and Respect Your Colleagues, which I find as the company grows— one of my colleagues, Boz, has this saying that we’re in danger of nicing ourselves to death.

I think as organizations grow, there’s a sort of politeness that comes in, where, when you’re just working with a small set of people and you’re comfortable with them, you can actually be a lot more blunt and direct. And Sheryl always says that the amount of progress that we make is directly proportional to the number of hard conversations that we’re willing to have. But as companies grow, I think it’s tougher to give hard feedback. So trying to build that into the cultural operating system, which is, we’re just going to really reward and focus on being direct with each other, I think is a really important thing. 

And then the last one—I realize I’ve been talking for, like, 10 minutes straight at this point, but I think this is the first time I’ve talked about this stuff publicly, so I have a lot of things to say.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s good.

Mark Zuckerberg: When we rebranded the company to Meta, we had this internal question of, what should we call our employees? And someone actually emailed Douglas Hofstadter, the renowned author and thinker. And he wrote back and was like, it should be Metamates. And so internally I felt like if Douglas Hofstadter thinks we should be Metamates, then who am I to disagree with that? So our last value is Meta, Metamates, Me, which is, it’s sort of this adaptation from this old naval saying, “Ship, shipmates, self.” As the company grows, you want to make sure that the people stay focused on the long term and the whole enterprise, and then their teams but also take care of themselves, but I think that sort of having that as a framework is pretty important. I’m happy to go into more detail on any of these, but I also want to be aware that this is quite a long answer and monologue as it is. So wherever you want to go with this.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let’s pick up on it and then I have up a whole bunch of other things I’d love to get into, but with respect to the values, I’ve seen and looked very closely at the values of, say, Amazon, which have iterated, that Bezos put together, and others. And I think the degree to which values end up the, for lack of a better term, sort of operating system of people at a company varies widely, company to company. And I’d love to know how or if you are—and you mentioned one example of the longer performance review timeframes, right?

Tim Ferriss: Incentivizing these behaviors. You have a team that is determining how to facilitate supporting these values throughout the organization so that they do have more saturation, so to speak.

Mark Zuckerberg: Each of these is basically coupled with an operational effort. So we have a set of work that we do. It’s like Move Fast is the work. Actually, it’s something that I’m pretty engaged in where I will just routinely go and sit down with, largely, engineering leaders, but also folks across the company and ask them, “Okay, well, what is slowing you down?” So in addition to the product reviews they’ll do where we’ll talk about, “What are the decisions we should be making or what should we be investing in?” I think it’s useful to often just sit down with people and have a whole conversation that are like, “All right, what are the things that are basically causing you to move more slowly?”

And then I view a bunch of my job as CEO, but then also we have other people who just work on this, to try to go remove those obstacles. And obviously, we have to do it in a way that helps fit the other goals of the company. So if people are saying, “Hey, it would make me be able to go faster if I just didn’t have to care about this issue,” if that’s an important issue, then obviously we’re not going to just say no. Right? It’s like, “Let’s figure out how we can care about that issue and do this as efficiently as possible.” But you can apply energy, methodically, over a long period of time towards oiling or greasing the wheels in the organization in the direction that you want. And I think you can get it done over time.

I remember, when I was first learning about running an organization, I had this conversation with this guy, Dan Rosensweig, who was the COO of Yahoo at the time. And he’s great. He’s a great person. And he told me this thing that will always stick with me, which is that, “Every organization sucks, but you get to choose the ways in which your organization sucks,” which is maybe the most negative possible way of putting it, but I think it’s basically, if you want to move fast on certain dimensions, you can, but you only get a few things like that.

If you want to optimize moving fast, we can do that. If we want to optimize being distributed first, we can do that, but maybe you get five of these. And we are very focused on operationalizing them and making sure that each of these values is backed up by real work streams that we have or decisions that we make or processes that we make, and when I mentioned changing the performance management tool, for Live in the Future, one of the big things that we’re doing is— and I don’t just want teams to be working distributed and working over video conference. I also want them to be using Workrooms and using their VR headsets to— Workrooms is this product. It’s the VR product that we built for collaboration, and it’s great. It’s early still, but it’s fascinating. It’s like you can— you’re in a meeting and you’re sitting around a table and, even though the fidelity isn’t quite as photorealistic on the avatars yet as, say, the conversation that we’re having now, the fact that you can sit around a table and you can see people’s gestures and you can have a side conversation if there’s 10 people around the table, you can turn to the person next to them and ask them a question, and there could be multiple conversations going on in the room, like a normal room, but obviously you can’t do anything like that over videoconference.

There are a bunch of things like that that actually make it, in some ways, feel more real already than videoconferences, even though the avatars are still very stylized and cartoony. But we just have a rule that everyone who’s in leadership or management should be, basically, doing at least one standing meeting a week in Workrooms. We want to get the feedback loop going that that team now is overwhelmed with feedback on how to get it to be even better, but I think one of the outcomes of this is I think Workrooms is going to probably learn what they need to do to be a great product and a lot faster than a lot of others in the space.

So I think that that’s one way to operationalize these, but you’ve got to operationalize them if you want them to be real. Otherwise, they’re just words that you put on a website somewhere.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: That’s generally true.

Tim Ferriss: So I’d love to ask a few more questions about just Web3, in general, and then maybe back step for a second to ask you about a number of other facets in your life. With Instagram and NFTs, so I know that Web3 is getting a lot of airtime right now. And I just came from a separate conference where every conversation involved Web3. And it strikes me that Web2, Web3, decentralized, centralized are going to coexist. I mean, I’m no expert, but it seems that people want curation. In many cases, they want trusted third parties. I don’t want to always be my own bank. There are good reasons why I use banks instead of not taking on all those responsibilities myself.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: The one that you just mentioned is, I think, a really fundamental one. At some level, you can make things censorship-resistant, which has a bunch of equities. And there are certainly a lot of people who feel like their expression is restricted online more than they would like, but that also prevents, if you really can’t stop people from expressing things, then how are you going to fight against terrorism or child exploitation or things that people think are really awful, even the people who generally want more stuff to be allowed online?

So really removing the ability for anyone to do any kind of moderation at all, in a broader platform, I think is problematic. I think in something like messaging, we don’t expect the people who run our messaging platforms, whether it’s us or Apple or whoever, to go moderate a message that you send in private, but it’s this distinction between the living room and the town square. If you’re in a space that’s a broader space, then I think that there is a little more need to make sure that things conform to the values that society wants and reducing things that are just really, that I think everyone agrees are bad, like terrorism and child exploitation and bullying and things like that.

Taking a step back on your question around Web3 and NFTs, I come at a lot of this from the perspective of thinking about the metaverse and how to make it more interoperable and a better environment for creators. I do think that there’s an interesting conversation to have around Instagram and Facebook and what to do there, but I tend to think about that as, how can you help bootstrap a creative economy in these 2D social apps that will be much, much bigger once you get to this metaverse vision over time?

I think the reason why operability is so important is because— Imagine this case. We get to a point where, instead of spending three hours a day on video conference calls, you are now spending that same time in, basically, feeling like you’re actually present with someone, either because they’re a hologram on your couch with augmented reality or you’re in virtual reality in something like Workrooms, but a future version of it where you’re actually, you feel like you’re physically there with them, around a table. Okay. So now, in a world where you’re spending a few hours a day doing that, you’re going to care about how you express yourself. Both the avatar—do you show up as a photorealistic version of yourself? Are you a dragon? Are you a stylized version? But a lot of this is going to be like, okay, how do we choose to express ourselves is through the clothing and what we wear and what we put on.

But now, imagine that every app that you go to, anything that you do to express yourself—so you get a sweatshirt, it’s in an app—you can’t actually bring that to another app. That would just be massively stifling for the whole creative economy because now, as a consumer, you’re not going to want to buy a lot of sweatshirts because they’re not going to be that useful, because you can’t bring them between places. And because you’re not going to want to buy that much, it’s going to be less useful for creators, and fewer people are going to be able to make a living, basically, designing these kind of experiences or virtual architecture, virtual clothes, or different things like that.

So the ability to be able to take how you want to express yourself and take your stuff with you between these different experiences, I think, is just a really key technical principle and standards thing to hopefully achieve with the metaverse. So I hope we can get there. And in order to push in that direction, I think it’s helpful to start sooner in things like Instagram and Facebook by supporting the communities that are doing things like NFTs so, that way, you can get to minting, you can get to bringing your stuff around between these different places.

But I do think that the challenges that you’re mentioning where all systems, I think, end up being some combination of some element of decentralized and centralized, I think, actually a lot of new systems just basically create value by decentralizing and creating more opportunity in some area by creating a new tool that a lot of people use. But I think we’ll need to get the balance right and that’s something that— I’m probably more optimistic about the Web3 stuff than most other people who are running these big companies. So I’m trying to push us to be more forward-leaning on that. 

Our fundamental belief is that, if we create more use cases where creators can start to do this stuff, then you’ll get more experimentation and you’ll also just get a bigger creative economy over time, which I think is a huge part of the goal.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I appreciate that.

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

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

So I think, therefore, you really want to not set up a situation where one company has to make a lot of these decisions by themselves. That’s why I wanted to create this oversight board. I recognized that we’re always going to have to be the first line and we’re going to be responsible for making the moderation decisions on our platform, but I thought it was important that we shouldn’t have the final say in the most important decisions and that there was a different body—the judicial analogy is something like a supreme court, although obviously there are all these differences here—but something that people can appeal to and that we can also refer some of the most complicated cases to and that they could make the final and binding judgment on that.

And one of the things that we’ve seen that I think has been interesting is that it does seem like there’s a little bit more acceptance when the oversight board weighs in on something complicated than when we just do it, ourselves. And I think part of that was we put a lot of thought into making sure that the people who are on the oversight board are world renowned, in terms of a focus on human rights, really focused on free expression, as well, because, at the end of the day, these platforms are about giving people a voice, diverse, spanning a large portion of the globe.

Legitimacy isn’t a binary thing. It’s not like either it’s completely rejected or it’s completely accepted by everyone. We were mindful in setting this up and I think the oversight board has also done a good job, itself, in managing its independence. It is a completely independent organization from us and it has to be. And its independence is super important for its continued legitimacy.

Overall, I’d say I’m sort of optimistic about how it’s going, but I think building that sort of trust and legitimacy also takes time. It’s not a thing that you can just turn on in a year and then, all of a sudden, people are like, “Okay, this thing exists. Great.” It’s going to be making decisions, it often overruling us or rebuking us on things and people seeing that we respect its independence and its authority and going and implementing that. That’s, I think, how it basically builds legitimacy over time, but I think, as an institution, I think it’s really important that we have this kind of independent function.

Of course, over time, having clear rules set and democratically elected congress would be, I think, the most useful thing. And we’re getting that, more or less, in different parts of the world. Obviously, it’s a little harder in the United States because— I think the First Amendment is great, so I’m obviously hugely supportive of the First Amendment, but I think that makes it harder for anyone in the United States to basically create or craft different regulations that weigh in on some of these trade-offs. But I do think, over time, there will be a balance that is struck across all of this, and I think that this is all part of that, moving towards that equilibrium.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. I think, in a lot of ways, that partnership has defined the growth of the company. First of all, I would give a huge amount of credit for this working to Sheryl. I think she is an amazing person. And if you think about, when she joined the company, I was, like, a kid. She was actually as old as I am now, almost 15 years ago. I was in my early 20s and didn’t know anything about business or running a company or anything like this. And I just think the extraordinary amount of patience that she had, and in a way, is— as a manager of an organization, it’s almost like she raised me like a child, and not just me. I think, like, a lot of the people we have on the team now. So I think she’s exceptional in that way.

One thing that’s interesting about our company is that the business is oddly divorced from the actual product. Most things, it’s like, okay, you build a product and you sell the product. And in our case, I think one of the things that created enough space for someone who has as much energy and is as senior as Sheryl to join is that fact that, in the type of business that we have, the consumer part of what we do is actually somewhat distinct from the advertising and the business part of what we do. There was enough space, I think, in the company to have two people— 

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good point.

Mark Zuckerberg: —who, basically, were primary principals for the company. I’ve debated this with a bunch of other peers and people who’ve created companies. You had a great podcast with Daniel Ek a while ago, towards the beginning of COVID. I’ve had this discussion with him a bunch of times. I was like, “Well…” He’s like, “I just couldn’t do that,” because he says, literally, for Spotify, it’s like they build the business and the content and all that stuff is like one kind of package; whereas, I think we’re sort of uniquely set up where I can focus on the consumer part of what we do and she can focus on all the advertising and building the business. And that just has worked incredibly well over a long period of time and I think will for a long time to come.

I just have a huge amount to learn from her, and I think she probably feels— I guess she feels the same way, but you’d have to ask her.

Tim Ferriss: That’ll be round two. So I do think that the separation of church and state, I mean, that’s probably an overstatement, but the clearly delineated halves of the company, so to speak, lend themselves to that. That’s a really good point. What are her superpowers? I know that may be a strange word to use, but I think of, say, Warren Buffett referring to Charlie Munger, saying he has the best 60-second mind on the planet. They have very complementary skillsets, slightly different views of the world, although highly compatible values. What are Sheryl’s superpowers that come to mind, if any?

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I think she has a very good combination of IQ and EQ. People either, I think, tend to be more manager or more strategic. And I think she is very unique in being both. I just think that that’s pretty rare. Obviously, if you get someone who’s great at strategy or great at product and they’re not a great manager, that’s great. If you can have someone who’s excellent at one of those things, you hire them every day. I think it’s just exceptionally rare to find people who spike in both of those areas.

But she actually uses a lot of dating analogies. I don’t, but in terms of this one—I was talking to a friend who is single recently, and we were talking about why she was single. And I do just think some people want to go through life with partnerships more than others. I think that there are some people who, they want a co-founder or they want a partner who they can run the thing with and who they can have that experience with on a day-to-day basis, and then there are other people who are like, “Okay. No, I’ll just have a team of five or six people around me and I’ll be the leader, the founder, but I don’t need another person.” I just think that that’s different.

Partnership has always meant a lot to me, both in my personal life and in work. I want people to be on the voyage with me. This isn’t a solo story. That’s, like, a lot of how I derive meaning in life. Again, you’d have to ask her whether she, maybe she’s oriented in a similar way, but I think, to some degree, I think whether partnerships work over time, probably the number one factor in that is whether you want the partnership to work.

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

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

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

But they were great parents for us, growing up. They really prioritized family, which is something that I definitely took from them. And I think, not only did I take it from them for myself, but it was really meaningful for me in, basically, who I look for as a partner. And Priscilla, I think, is really focused on this and she obviously has an amazing career and has way more jobs than I do, in addition to being a parent, but the family orientation is a really big deal.

My parents always pushed for— they cared that we achieved and did great in school, but beyond that, they didn’t really care what specific thing we were interested in. They just wanted to expose us to a bunch of things and then, if we were interested in something, then they would try to push us to become excellent at that thing. My mom was never like, “You should go fence.” She was just like, “Sports are good. Go find some sport.” It’s like, “Oh, you like fencing?” It’s like, “All right. Well, let’s get good at that.”

I have three sisters, and they’re all excellent at very different things. Our family is, I think, quite musical, but that’s most expressed through Randi, who is just an excellent musician. And you can kind of go through the different siblings. I guess I got computers.

Tim Ferriss: That seems to have worked out for you.

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah. I think so. I’d say Donna is the intellectual one, and Elle has always been the most well-rounded and social and athletic of us, which is— As I’ve grown up and I’ve gotten even more into sports, just it’s been really fun just getting to see how much better she is than me at skiing and all these things that we grew up together doing. But no, I think that’s how I hope to raise our kids, is— I care a lot that they’re going to be good at school, but I also care that they can get exposed to a lot of different things and choose the things that they want to do. It’s a fun adventure. One of the things in terms of my parenting is no matter what is going on in the day, I always do bedtime with them. I mean, I guess every once in a while I have to travel. Although with COVID it’s been nice, I haven’t had to travel that much. That’s maybe one silver lining of the pandemic for the last couple of years. But I just take an hour every day, and we read, we sing. I’m reading this book with them now, The Way of the Warrior Kid , which is good. I recommend it.

Tim Ferriss: Wait a second. Is this Jocko?

Mark Zuckerberg: It is.

Tim Ferriss: Jocko Willink, look at that. That’s great.

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

Tim Ferriss: Jocko’s first ever long-form public interview is on this podcast.

Mark Zuckerberg: There you go.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, so I know Jocko very well.

Mark Zuckerberg: This book was recommended to me by Tobi Lütke, the founder and CEO of Shopify. The girls love it, and now they’ve started training jiu-jitsu. This is this stuff, takes on a life its own. It’s super fun having stuff that we do together every day. Then, I always wrap up the day with them. We have this routine that Max calls the goodnight things. Which is basically every night we go through, I’m like, “All right, what are the things that are most important in life?” They’re health, loving family and friends, and something you’re excited about. What did you do to help someone today? We basically go through each of these things, and it’s like, all right, so health. What did you do to like, make yourself stronger, more fit today? If you get hurt, Max broke her leg skiing once. Let’s go through the parts of your body that still work and that you’re going to be able to use while you’re recovering.

Then, it’s like, okay, loving family and friends. Let’s go through something that you did today with a person who is meaningful to you. And then, I think something you’re excited about, and this is my philosophy on life. I’m just trying to like boil it down for them. I guess the adult version of this is, I think, you have to have something that you’re looking forward to for the future. I think that’s just a really important part of keeping people going with the weight of life. For kids, it tends to be something that they’re excited about tomorrow. More often than not it’s just I’m excited to see mom in the morning or I get to eat Cheerios at breakfast. It’s like, okay, it’s not super inspiring but the right basic idea. Then, every once in a while, it’s something like, Max is like, “I’m going to get ski poles next week.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s like a big milestone.” Or it’s like, “I’m going to lose my first tooth,” or “I can’t wait until I can do jiu-jitsu again.”

Then, the last one I think is probably the most important. Which is, I think especially for our family, especially for these girls who are obviously growing up in a very wealthy family, it’s like, you’re going to do something nice to help someone every day. This is just like an important service orientation, that I think that I just want our family to have, and we just all go around. I tell them something nice that I tried to do to help someone, and they have to tell me something nice that they did to help someone. It could just be like another kid at school or it could be mom or a cousin or something like that. Probably much to their chagrin, I don’t let them go to sleep until they can tell me something nice that they did to help someone that day. That’s probably the best encapsulation of how I think about parenting and the values that I want to try to impart to them.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you for sharing all of that. I want to say a few things. Number one, Tobi, one of my favorite people. I’ve known Tobi—

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, he’s great.

Tim Ferriss: —since 2008 or so, and people might be wondering, why am I asking about family? Why am I asking about parenting? Part of the reason I’m asking is because many people who listen to this podcast listen to model, they listen to model people. I think it’s very important to get a holistic picture of how people think about and prioritize things in their lives and manage things in their lives. Because you can end up, if you’re not careful, say, in the realm of business, modeling someone who is from an external perspective, very financially successful, but their family lives, their relationships are in shambles. I do think that the micro can be a reflection of the macro, which is why I like to explore these things. On the point of things that are important in life, man, I love that you’re reading Jocko’s book to your kids. It’s fantastic. Do not—well, actually, no, someday you should roll with Jocko. He is a black belt in jiu-jitsu and is an absolute killer. Probably above your weight class, but worth rolling with nonetheless.

Speaking of things that are important in life, I would love to ask you about—and this is going to be an interesting transition—the sacred and then the secular. For the secular, I have a very specific kind of technical question, but on the sacred, I’d love to ask you what role religion plays in your life, if any, how do you think about that?

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s actually, I think playing an increasing role in recent years. I mean, I was raised Jewish, and I think from the time I went to college or so maybe I wasn’t as focused on it. But I think a few things in the last five or six years have made me a little more focused on it. One is of course family and having kids. You want to have traditions for the kids. A lot of the time it’s like, “Okay, well, here are the things that I did when I was growing up, and that I thought were meaningful.” The ones that are good, you want to do, and the ones that aren’t, you don’t. I just found having that community and values grounding was really valuable. So we are raising our girls to be Jewish, and that’s become a more important part of our lives. Every Friday, pretty much no matter what’s going on, we do Shabbat dinner. Priscilla actually loves this. I mean, she’s basically, it’s sort of a meditative thing for her, but from I think about Tuesday or Wednesday, she starts carving out like an hour or so of the two day to like start cooking the Shabbat dinner. Basically, we have a bunch of friends over. It’s just a real center point to the week. That element, I think, is more cultural.

Then there’s, I’d say for me personally and our company, probably for a lot of people around the world, I mean the last five or six years have been pretty tough. If you just look at how people felt about our company before 2016, if you look at like average sentiment around the company, it’s like, there was almost like never a month when the sentiment was negative. Since 2016, there’s almost never been a month where the net sentiment has been positive. There have been so many social issues that have been kind of brought to the forefront— you know, we talked about this a little bit, in terms of the oversight board and how it’s important that it’s not just like one person or one company making all these decisions, trying to balance these complex social equities. But there just need to be things that are bigger than you in your life. Even though our country has a lot of struggles, I probably believe more in democracy now than I would’ve. I probably didn’t think about it that deeply before, but I just think believing in kind of democracy in our institutions is sort of a bigger force than any individual, I think is sort of a grounding thing.

I think similarly believing that there are things that are bigger than that, like God, I think is also sort of a really grounding thing for me. The more you sort of study the Bible or the Torah or whatever, I mean, there is like just a lot of wisdom in it. In terms of how to live your life, how to think about creation and building. I mean, no matter what you’re doing, no matter how kind of modern or technological it is, I just think that there are interesting lessons. It’s like, at the beginning of the Torah in Genesis, most of, like, the Bible’s basically rules for how to live your life. But it starts with, why does it start in this place of talking about the creation? It starts off with God created people in God’s image. It’s like, well, what does that mean? What does that mean you’re supposed to go do? It starts off talking about creation. It’s how God created all the stuff, it’s like, yeah, I think that there’s like a real interpretation in that, that is kind of personal to me, which is a lot of what we are here to do is create good things in the world.

I think that’s very intrinsic to when I’m having a bad day or a bad month, I just think like there’s something that’s sort of grounded in, it’s like, no, this is like what I think a big part of what we are here to do—build things that make the world better. And I think that is like a fundamental thing that is sort of ancient wisdom. As people face challenges in their lives, and as you think about the next generation, I think that these are both things that tend to ground you and tie you to much longer arcs and traditions. That’s certainly been the case in my life.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: That’s the balance, is to understand that there are things that are bigger than you, but what you do still matters.

Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to get to the secular question, and I know we’re running up on time shortly, but in the 2010 New Yorker profile, which, can’t believe everything you read, so we’ll see where we go. Among interests that were cited here, one was eliminating desire. Do you recall having this in your interests? I’m curious about this.

Mark Zuckerberg: Very emo.

Tim Ferriss: It’s very emo.

Mark Zuckerberg: That might have been more of a phase of life.

Tim Ferriss: That was the Mark emo phase. All right. We could—

Mark Zuckerberg: Paint my room black. Yeah, no.

Tim Ferriss: All right. We can chalk that up to emo. Emo, period, check, explained. I’m going to get to the technical question. Before I get to that though, you did personal challenges annually for about 10 years. Which challenge ended up being much easier than expected, and which one ended up being much harder than expected. Either, or. Just be curious to know.

Mark Zuckerberg: I still do stuff like this. I don’t make as big of a deal of it anymore, but I think just kind of throwing yourself into different situations to learn new things. I think that’s just a big part of life. But which ones were hard? One, I tried to meet a new person every day for the year. That was hard for me. I’m pretty introverted. I built some amazing relationships out of it. I started teaching this class at the local boys and girls club with a friend and mentored the kids. I just talked to them a couple weeks ago, they were all, none of their families had gone to college before, and now they’re all graduating college. It’s pretty cool.

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.

Mark Zuckerberg: But I’m super introverted. I think that’s probably been another silver lining of the whole distributed work thing for me, is having space to kind of think and kind of control my time and like not get interrupted by other people so much. But it was an interesting balance being introverted but also being pretty sensitive and caring a lot about other people. I think that people kind of think that introverts don’t like other people or something. That’s not true. I just, just get overwhelmed easily.

The interesting thing is they all went in weird directions. One year I did this year of running. I did all kinds of different running. I did sprints, I did long distance running, and then my knees started hurting. Then, I broadened out and did triathlons, and we were training for this Iron Man, but then I broke my arm biking, so that ended up not quite happening. So they all kind of go in different directions. I learned Mandarin one year. Learned Mandarin, you can’t learn Mandarin in a year. I ended up studying it for—

Tim Ferriss: A challenging one.

Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, maybe someone can, I cannot. We talked about my language deficiency earlier on. That was partially, I like kind of throwing myself into things that are hard. Like I said before, I mean, I’ve studied a lot of languages in my life. A little Spanish, a little French, a little Hebrew, a lot of Latin, a bunch of Greek, but it’s actually hard for me. So I kind of like doing things that are hard for me. Obviously, Mandarin is important because Priscilla’s family is Chinese. Priscilla and I, after dating for almost 10 years, we decided we didn’t want to have like a big wedding that a lot of people, we didn’t want a lot of people asking us about it for a while, so we did it as a surprise wedding. Basically didn’t tell anyone, and in the morning of the wedding, we’re kind of telling everyone. I told Priscilla’s mother in Mandarin and I never knew before that, if she understood anything I was saying. And I just told her, and a single tear went down her face, and I was like, “Okay, my Mandarin is at least good enough for that.”

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

Mark Zuckerberg: A lot of them have a physical element just because I tend to think people focus so much on thought process, decision making, like, how can I be as smart as possible? I just think like energy level and— There hasn’t been that much that’s been written about historical figures and energy level as opposed to how they thought. But I actually would be very fascinated about, to kind of understand that. But I think just, I mean learning how to foil surf and things like that. It’s super humbling. I mean, these are like really hard skills. It takes like, before you can even get going—

Tim Ferriss: Foiling’s really hard— 

Mark Zuckerberg: I’m such a beginner. It’s just wild and it’s so much fun. You start off doing this like down-winding thing. I mean, the awesome thing about the foil is there’s almost no friction, compared to a surfboard. A surfboard, you need to be in a big wave or you just stop. But a foil, you’re kind of standing on the board, and you’re actually riding this little wing, and it has no friction or very little friction. You can basically just ride it on open ocean swells. It’s this great workout you can pump in between swells, and your heart rate gets up to like 160. But you can go for like a mile or more, and it’s just, it’s wild, and it’s a great workout. You can’t think about anything else while you are doing it because you will fall immediately. Learning new things is a big part of what brings meaning and joy to life.

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

Mark Zuckerberg: One of the wildest technical challenges for augmented reality, is that basically, you need to fit all this stuff into essentially a normal pair of glasses. VR will always— It’s supposed to be immersive. I mean, maybe it’ll eventually be more like ski goggles, it’ll be kind of thinner, but it’s not meant to just look like normal glasses. Whereas, augmented reality, if you’re going to wear that throughout the day, it really, it needs to be socially acceptable. You’re basically talking about the normal frames of glasses, maybe called thick rim frames, maybe five millimeters thick. Within that, you’re talking about fitting, what would’ve been called a super computer five or 10 years ago, basically like a laser projector, then, the tools to basically have that display, kind of, holograms with wave guides.

Because in order to make sure that the image in the holograms stays synced in the right place, it needs to know where your eye position is. You need, like, lasers that understand where your eyes are, and then it needs to have speakers because of course you’re going to want sound. It probably needs microphones because you’re going to want to have an assistant and talk to it, has sort of positional tracking so that way, if I’m sitting on your couch as a hologram and you move your head, I’m not moving off the couch. It needs to know exactly where you’re looking at. Okay. All that stuff to do all that computation instantly in glasses that are five millimeters thick. So I think this is one of the wildest technical challenges of the next 10 or 15 years, which is why I’m so excited about it. There’s this odd thing, where I think sometimes people get really inspired by physically big things. I actually think miniaturizing things to be tiny, is in a lot of ways, even a harder challenge. This is a lot of the work that’s going to happen.

Will it be valuable to have another phone or something like that? I don’t know, maybe. On the one hand, you can offload computing so that’s good. One of the biggest things that basically is a limiting factor is actually heat dissipation. If you have a processor that’s running on your glasses and it’s getting hot, you are making your face kind of warm and that’s uncomfortable. So if you can have that in your pocket, that’s better. On the flip side, you need to find a way to get all that stuff to the glasses and back and wireless chips are actually pretty energy intensive too. At some point, you’re going to always have some computation on the glasses. The kind of equilibrium I don’t think is to have all of the computation somewhere else. Then, you start getting into this interesting trade off, which is okay, well, if you’re Apple and you have the iPhone, is that an advantage? I think that there are a bunch of different questions in that. One is to what extent are they just going to advantage their own devices or they’re going to make it so that some of the APIs are open? And I think that this is somewhat of a regulatory question, right?

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s like, are they going to be allowed to just make something that has— They have a billion iPhones out there. Are the regulatory agencies around the world going to allow them to just only make it so that their glasses work with their thing? It seems to me like that there would be an issue with that. Then, there’s this other issue, which is if you were designing a secondary device for, say, input or something like that, it probably wouldn’t look like a phone exactly. There’s also some ways in which, I think when new computing platforms come around, people tend to assume that that model is sort of going to work, and that whatever the new thing is just sort of a peripheral to that existing platform. I think it kind of depends. It’s like maybe the watch is more of a peripheral to your phone, but I would guess that augmented and virtual reality are so fundamentally different, that whatever you want in your constellation of devices, you probably want it to be designed specifically for that and not just, okay, you happen to have a phone, now let’s shoehorn it into doing augmented reality too. I think there’s a lot of interesting questions in this, but I don’t know, at the end of the day, I think that there’s just a ton to be invented, and there are a lot of different ways that this could go.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: I feel like we could.

Mark Zuckerberg: —into science at all or curing diseases.

Tim Ferriss: I know, I know. A lot of notes left.

Mark Zuckerberg: Maybe there’s a whole ’nother session on that. Maybe like another couple of hours at some point.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.

Mark Zuckerberg: But this has been a lot of fun, so thank you for having me on.

Tim Ferriss: Of course, I really appreciate you being on and making the time for it. To everybody listening, we’ll also link to everything in the show notes, certainly. If there are any additional resources, Mark, that you or your team would like to put in the show notes, we can add those in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. Certainly, people can find you online rather easily, I would say—Facebook, Zuck; Instagram, slash-Zuck; and of course, people can find Meta at meta.com. It’s been fun to have a wide-ranging conversation and as expected, I have many, many pages of topics left that we could cover. Certainly the science and research side is something that, if the opportunity presents itself, I’d love to get into at some point. But I really appreciate you taking time to have this conversation, Mark.

Mark Zuckerberg: This has been fun. Thanks for having me.

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Mark Zuckerberg: Most future jobs will be more 'creative' than 'traditional labor or service'

In Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the future, most forms of everyday work could require more imagination.

On a recent episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," hosted by MIT computer scientist Lex Fridman, the Meta founder and CEO said that as modern technology continues to develop, tech-focused jobs will increasingly dominate the world — just not necessarily the types of "tech jobs" one might experience today.

"Part of what I think is going to be great about the creative economy and the metaverse ... [is that] a lot more people in the future are going to get to work doing creative stuff than what I think today we would just consider traditional labor or service," Zuckerberg said.

His prediction stems from personal experience: When he first launched Facebook in 2004, coding "helped build something utilitarian," he said. Now, he added, he watches his daughter make "code art," typing in equations to create visual, artistic expressions.

The idea, Zuckerberg said, isn't that every future job will involve digital art. Rather, it's that the automation of some basic systems — which enables children to easily create art through code, for example — will allow people to spend more time on tasks like creating new products and making older processes more efficient.

The concept itself isn't exactly new. For years, tech experts have predicted that artificial intelligence will eventually be able to replace humans in relatively mundane tasks, like compiling spreadsheets or writing basic code.

With less time spent on tasks like gathering and organization data, people will theoretically be able to spend more time on analysis and brainstorming – which require a type of creative, critical thinking that artificial intelligence can't replicate.

"These efficiency-boosting technologies are fantastic for eliminating the need for human engagement in time-consumer back-office tasks or physical heavy lifting – enabling humans to focus more on the intellectual heavy lifting," Ernst & Young global CTO Nicola Morini Bianzino wrote in a blog post last year.

That shift may already be occurring: The Covid-19 pandemic expedited the implementation of robots into everyday life in toll booths, hospitals and dining halls across the country. In October 2020 , the World Economic Forum predicted that data entry, secretarial, accounting, factory and mechanic jobs would likely be lost to machines by 2025.

In total, according to the World Economic Forum's report, 85 million jobs could be eliminated within the next few years. But that number could be far outweighed by the report's estimated 97 million new roles created by emerging technology.

Those jobs would largely be in fields like digital marketing, business development and data analysis — which tend to require creative and critical thinking skills, the report noted.

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Leadership Qualities – Styles, Skills, and Traits of Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of the blue and white platform called Facebook, which has given us the privilege to be with our friends and families 24/7 and share each moment with them. He was a student at Harvard but got dropped out from there. But the base of Facebook was established by him through the years on Harvard, and after getting out of there, he devoted all of himself to his dream project, and now we all know the result. Today the annual revenue of Facebook is nearly $17.9 billion, with almost 1.7 billion users worldwide. Whatever Facebook is now, Mark Zuckerberg is the one who made everything possible. And today, we’re going to know about his leadership style, qualities, and skills behind Facebook’s success. 

He is one of the most influential tech entrepreneur in the recently history of the world. In this study we will look closely what we can learn from his leadership quality and style. 

Leadership Qualities of Mark Zuckerberg

Seeing things differently:  There’s no doubt that Mark Zuckerberg has built Facebook with his amazing programming knowledge, but many people have that knowledge, but not everyone has come up with something like Facebook. Because Mark has a visionary power in himself, he likes to see things differently. Before Facebook, there’re other platforms for communication but mostly with ordinary features. But Mark wanted to do something unique. And even now, he’s continually trying to make Facebook more unique with his numerous ideas and vision.

Developing the right company culture:  Facebook isn’t like an ordinary workplace. It doesn’t maintain any strict flat hierarchy or workplace rules. Here employees with creativity, innovation, and out-of-the-box get valued and rewarded. Any employee can just relax anywhere in the office and do his work. The whole Facebook office’s design is the most unique one than any other big company in the world. And all these ideas mainly came from Zuckerberg, who wanted to build a workplace environment and culture where people won’t feel pressured and enjoy working.

He surrounds himself with the right people:  The visionary power of Zuckerberg always helped him to get in touch with the right people. The idea of creating Facebook was criticized initially, but he made the team with some friends and roommate who believed in him and helped him to launch Facebook. Still now, in every situation, Mark manages to get the right people with him. Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, who has contributed a lot to the company, didn’t get much acceptance in the beginning by others in the company. But Mark believed in him and showed others how much right he was by hiring Sheryl. 

Willing to face criticism:  Mark Zuckerberg has been criticized a lot for his decisions. A few years ago, when he was accused of some severe charges of privacy violation of users and had to go to court, he lots a huge amount of popularity among people. But still, he never gave up and took all the blames positively. He believes criticisms are a part of life, and it teaches some lessons as well. That’s why it’s better to face and accept those.

Leadership Style of Mark Zuckerberg:  Mark Zuckerberg has never followed any structured leadership. He was both aggressive and encouraging. He did his best to provide a friendly and relaxed workplace. But his employees reported him as a bad listener. It can be said that he uses autocratic , democratic , and laissez-fair leadership styles all at once. But throughout the year’s Mark has tried to improve himself and now he has become more communicative. And that’s what makes him a Transformational Leader .  He has learned from his mistake and now focused on changing his actions for the betterment of the company and the employees. 

Leadership Characteristics and Traits of Mark Zuckerberg

Here’re some traits of Mark Zuckerberg that describe his personal characteristics that get reflected in his leadership style.

• Hard worker

Mark Zuckerberg knows what he wants, and when he gets engaged in something, he never loses his focus. He can continuously work for the betterment of his company or on a new idea. Surely he has some outstanding programming skills and compelling vision, but it is hard work, which made him to all these things he has done till today.

Mark Zuckerberg is ruthless whenever he needs to be. The steaming clash with the Winklevoss twins and co-founder Estavez caused much hype in the media due to Mark’s ruthlessness. He’s always determined to remove the competitive threats in the market. We all know how he became desperate to bring down the popularity of Snapchat and divert more people towards Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. 

Like most of the leaders, Mark doesn’t believe in taking risks without proper analysis. Yes, he has made many bold decisions, and he believes that not taking risks is the most significant risk, but only after a thorough calculation and exploration. He first measures the possibilities and only then moves forward to the next step.

Other traits and characteristics of Mark Zuckerberg are:

• Relationship-oriented
• Assertiveness
• Mindfulness 
• Multi-tasking
• Accepting challenges
• Competitive
• Strong values

Leadership Skills of Mark Zuckerberg

Each leader has some skills that help him/her to perform his/her duties more perfectly. Here’re some leadership skills of Mark Zuckerberg.

Critical thinker:  Mark always tends to thinks deeply. He likes to have a clear idea, no matter how small a fact is. He believes his more profound thought and understanding helps him to know what’s right or wrong. He better accepts the second or third best idea after a clear understanding instead of grabbing the best idea without any thoughts.

Problem Solving:  Marks Zuckerberg is a problem-solver. He continually asks himself if he is doing right or why a specific idea isn’t working. He never leaves a problem without considering it the second time. Once he said that until he gets what’s actually wrong and how it can be fixed, he can’t just sit and relax. He feels an urge to solve the puzzle. 

Equanimity:  As a leader, Mark is someone who doesn’t lose his cool easily, no matter how stressful the situation becomes. He can take a lot of pressure and talks normally. There were many times when his company’s inside situation was a mess, and everyone was panicked. But he controlled everything maturely with a gentle and calm approach.

Bottom Line

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t a perfect leader. He was criticized many times for his leadership techniques and qualities. Even there were rumors that he might leave Facebook. But he never had the sense of giving up. He changed his flaws and constantly working to improve himself. And we hope there’s more to see from himself.

• Leadership Skills, and Style of Jeff Bezos
• Leadership Qualities of Larry Page
• Leadership Style of Tim Cook
• https://maisfl.com/leadership-attributes-of-mark-zuckerberg-essay/
• https://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/why-mark-zuckerbergs-leadership-failure-was-a-predictable-surprise/
• https://www.businessinsider.com/this-one-trait-makes-you-a-better-boss-according-to-mark-zuckerberg-2018-1
• https://ceomarkzuckerberg.weebly.com/leadership.html
• https://www.livechat.com/success/zuckerberg-effect-qualities-of-a-good-boss/

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Untitled Leader

Mark Zuckerberg’s Impact on the Future of Leadership

Unpacking the Leadership Style of Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is a name that has become synonymous with innovation and leadership in the tech industry. Born in 1984, Zuckerberg is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook , the world’s largest social media platform. As the CEO of Facebook, he has played a pivotal role in the growth and success of the company.

Zuckerberg’s leadership style has been described as visionary, ambitious, and unapologetically bold. He is known for his ability to make difficult decisions, take risks, and challenge the status quo. He has a strong belief in the power of technology to change the world, and this passion is evident in his leadership of Facebook.

Let’s explore the leadership lessons and stories of Mark Zuckerberg. Over the course of his career, Zuckerberg has faced numerous challenges and opportunities for growth, and his leadership has evolved in response to these experiences. By examining his journey as a leader, we can gain valuable insights into what it takes to lead a successful company in the tech industry.

We will delve into various aspects of Zuckerberg’s leadership, including his early years and the founding of Facebook, leading through growth and innovation, lessons in crisis management, leading a global company, and personal growth and leadership development. Each of these topics provides a unique perspective on Zuckerberg’s leadership journey and the lessons that can be learned from it.

Overall, this article seeks to highlight the key leadership qualities and strategies that have contributed to Zuckerberg’s success as a leader. Whether you are an aspiring leader or a seasoned executive, there is much to be learned from the experiences of this visionary entrepreneur.

Early Years and Founding Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg was born and raised in New York. From a young age, he showed a keen interest in computers and programming. In high school, he developed an early version of the music streaming service that would eventually become Pandora. However, it was at Harvard University where Zuckerberg would make his mark as an entrepreneur.

In 2004, Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates. The social networking platform quickly gained popularity on college campuses across the country and eventually expanded to other countries. At the time, Zuckerberg was just 19 years old and had limited experience in running a business. Nevertheless, he displayed an early talent for leadership that would serve him well in the years to come.

One of the most notable aspects of Zuckerberg’s leadership during Facebook’s early days was his unwavering vision for the company. From the outset, he believed that Facebook could change the way people interacted with one another online. He was passionate about creating a platform that would enable people to connect and share information in new and meaningful ways.

Zuckerberg’s leadership during Facebook’s early days was also marked by his willingness to take risks. He was not afraid to try new things, and he was constantly looking for ways to improve the platform. For example, he introduced the News Feed feature, which proved controversial at the time but ultimately became one of Facebook’s most popular features.

Perhaps most importantly, Zuckerberg was able to rally his team around a shared vision for the company. He believed in the importance of creating a culture of innovation and collaboration, and he worked hard to foster this culture within Facebook. He was always accessible to his team members and encouraged them to share their ideas and feedback.

Zuckerberg’s leadership during Facebook’s early days set the foundation for the company’s future success. His vision, willingness to take risks, and focus on creating a collaborative culture were all critical elements of his leadership style. As we will see in the following sections, these qualities would continue to be central to Zuckerberg’s leadership as Facebook continued to grow and evolve.

Leading Through Growth and Innovation

As Facebook continued to grow, Zuckerberg faced new challenges as a leader. The platform had expanded beyond college campuses and was now being used by people all over the world. This presented a new set of opportunities and challenges for the company, and Zuckerberg was determined to continue pushing the boundaries of what was possible.

One of the key ways in which Zuckerberg led Facebook through its period of rapid growth was by continuing to prioritize innovation. He was constantly looking for new ways to improve the platform and to meet the changing needs of users. This led to the introduction of a range of new products and features, including the Like button, Messenger, and Live Video.

Zuckerberg’s leadership during this period was characterized by his willingness to take risks. He recognized that in order to continue growing, Facebook would need to be willing to embrace change and to try new things. This led to some bold moves, such as the company’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. These acquisitions proved to be incredibly successful, and they helped to cement Facebook’s position as a dominant force in the tech industry.

At the same time, Zuckerberg remained committed to the company’s original mission of connecting people and fostering meaningful relationships. He recognized that as the company continued to grow, it would be important to stay grounded in this mission and to prioritize the needs of users above all else.

Zuckerberg’s leadership during Facebook’s period of rapid growth was marked by his ability to balance innovation and risk-taking with a commitment to the company’s core mission. He was always looking for new ways to push the boundaries of what was possible, while at the same time remaining grounded in the values that had made Facebook successful in the first place. As we will see in the following sections, this approach would continue to be central to Zuckerberg’s leadership as Facebook faced new challenges and opportunities in the years to come.

Lessons in Crisis Management

In recent years, Facebook has faced a number of high-profile crises, including controversies around data privacy and the spread of fake news. These challenges have tested Zuckerberg’s leadership skills and have forced him to confront some difficult questions about the role of social media in society.

Zuckerberg’s response to each crisis has been closely scrutinized by the public and the media. In some cases, he has been criticized for not taking decisive enough action, while in others, he has been accused of overreacting. Through it all, however, he has remained committed to being transparent and accountable to Facebook’s users.

One of the most important lessons that can be learned from Zuckerberg’s crisis management is the importance of transparency. In the wake of the data privacy scandal, for example, he acknowledged that Facebook had made mistakes and pledged to do better in the future. He also testified before Congress and other government bodies, answering tough questions about the company’s practices and policies.

Another key lesson from Zuckerberg’s crisis management is the importance of accountability. He recognized that as the CEO of Facebook, he had a responsibility to take action to address the company’s challenges. This led to a number of changes within Facebook, including increased investment in data privacy and efforts to combat the spread of fake news.

Finally, Zuckerberg’s response to Facebook’s crises underscores the importance of taking a long-term perspective. He recognized that the challenges facing Facebook were not going to be solved overnight and that the company would need to make sustained efforts to regain the trust of users and the public. This commitment to long-term thinking has been a critical part of Zuckerberg’s leadership as Facebook continues to navigate a complex and rapidly evolving landscape.

Zuckerberg’s response to Facebook’s crises offers valuable lessons for leaders in any industry. By prioritizing transparency, accountability, and long-term thinking, he has been able to steer the company through some of its toughest challenges and emerge stronger on the other side. As we will see in the following sections, these lessons would continue to be central to Zuckerberg’s leadership as Facebook faced new challenges in the years to come.

Leading a Global Company

As Facebook has continued to grow, it has become a truly global company with employees and users all around the world. This presents a unique set of challenges for leadership, as Zuckerberg must navigate cultural differences, language barriers, and other factors that can impact the success of a global organization.

One of the key ways in which Zuckerberg leads Facebook as a global company is by prioritizing diversity and inclusion. He recognizes that in order to succeed in a global marketplace, Facebook must be able to attract and retain employees from a wide range of backgrounds and cultures. This requires a deep understanding of different cultural norms and an ability to create an environment where all employees feel valued and respected.

At the same time, Zuckerberg recognizes the importance of fostering a cohesive company culture. He has worked hard to create a sense of shared purpose and identity among Facebook’s employees, even as the company has grown and expanded across the globe. This has involved everything from regular town hall meetings to open office layouts designed to encourage collaboration and communication.

One of the biggest challenges of managing a global company like Facebook is the sheer scale of the organization. With millions of users and employees around the world, it can be difficult to maintain a consistent message and to ensure that everyone is aligned around the same goals and priorities. To overcome this challenge, Zuckerberg has emphasized the importance of clear communication and a strong sense of shared values.

Zuckerberg’s leadership of Facebook as a global company offers valuable insights into what it takes to succeed in today’s interconnected world. By prioritizing diversity and inclusion, fostering a cohesive company culture, and navigating the unique challenges of managing a global organization, he has been able to lead Facebook to continued success and growth. As we will see in the following section, this approach would continue to be central to Zuckerberg’s leadership as Facebook faces new challenges and opportunities in the years to come.

Personal Growth and Leadership Development

One of the most impressive aspects of Zuckerberg’s leadership is his willingness to adapt and evolve over time. As Facebook has grown and faced new challenges, he has continued to refine his leadership style and to learn from his experiences.

One of the most notable examples of this evolution is the way in which Zuckerberg has become more comfortable with public speaking and media interviews. In the early days of Facebook, he was famously shy and uncomfortable in front of the camera. However, as the company has grown, he has recognized the importance of being able to communicate effectively with the public and has worked hard to improve his public speaking skills.

Another way in which Zuckerberg’s leadership style has evolved over time is in his approach to decision-making. In the early days of Facebook, he was known for making quick decisions and taking bold risks. However, as the company has grown, he has recognized the importance of taking a more deliberate and strategic approach to decision-making. He has also become more open to feedback and more willing to listen to the perspectives of others.

Throughout his career, Zuckerberg has emphasized the importance of continuous learning and growth for leaders. He is a voracious reader and is constantly seeking out new ideas and perspectives. He has also been open about his own personal growth journey, including his experiences with meditation and mindfulness.

Zuckerberg’s personal growth and leadership development offer valuable lessons for leaders in any industry. By being open to feedback, taking a strategic approach to decision-making, and embracing continuous learning and growth, he has been able to evolve his leadership style and to continue leading Facebook to new heights.

Throughout his career, Mark Zuckerberg has been a visionary leader who has had a profound impact on the tech industry. From the early days of Facebook to its current position as one of the world’s most valuable companies, his leadership has been marked by a commitment to innovation, risk-taking, and a deep understanding of the needs of users.

One of the key lessons to be learned from Zuckerberg’s leadership journey is the importance of having a clear vision for your company. From the outset, he had a clear idea of what he wanted Facebook to be and was able to rally his team around this vision. This helped to create a sense of purpose and direction that has been critical to Facebook’s success.

Another important lesson from Zuckerberg’s leadership is the importance of embracing change and taking risks. He recognized that in order to continue growing and innovating, Facebook would need to be willing to try new things and to take bold risks. This approach has led to some of Facebook’s most successful products and acquisitions.

Zuckerberg’s leadership has also been marked by his ability to navigate crises and to emerge stronger on the other side. From data privacy scandals to controversies around fake news, he has remained committed to transparency and accountability, and has worked hard to address the challenges facing Facebook.

As a global company, Facebook has faced unique challenges related to cultural differences and managing a massive organization. Zuckerberg’s leadership in this area offers valuable insights into what it takes to lead a successful global company, including the importance of diversity, inclusion, and clear communication.

Finally, Zuckerberg’s personal growth and leadership development offer a powerful example of the importance of continuous learning and growth for leaders. By being open to feedback, embracing new ideas, and challenging his own assumptions, he has been able to evolve his leadership style and to continue leading Facebook to new heights.

In conclusion, Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership journey offers valuable lessons for leaders in any industry. By prioritizing a clear vision, embracing change and risk-taking, navigating crises with transparency and accountability, leading a global organization with diversity and inclusion, and embracing personal growth and development, he has set a powerful example of what it takes to succeed as a leader in today’s complex and rapidly evolving world.

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The Unexpected Management Genius of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

Here’s what you can learn from Fortune’ s Businessperson of the Year.

The first time I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg , back in 2005, he was all of 21 years old and could have passed for 16. He had recently dropped out of Harvard to move his startup to Silicon Valley and was obviously enjoying the novelty of being called CEO. Facebook’s website—there was no mobile version yet—had 6 million users and was open exclusively to high school and college students. It had only just added a feature allowing users to upload multiple photos to their profiles. But the company was already a hot commodity, valued at $100 million and coveted by buyers who were willing to pay far more. And despite his callowness, it was obvious that Zuckerberg was an entrepreneur who was, as I wrote at the time, “preternaturally levelheaded.”

If there was one point Zuckerberg was most forceful about that day, it was this: He wasn’t the least bit interested in selling his year-old company. “I’m in this to build something cool, not to get bought,” he said with a bloodless sincerity that was altogether convincing.

Eleven years later Zuckerberg ( No. 1, Businessperson of the Year ) has built something beyond cool: He has willed into being a global phenomenon. Facebook (FB) is a nearly 16,000-employee media powerhouse worth $350 billion—and also an advertising-technology juggernaut on track to annual revenues of more than $27 billion in 2016 and gaudy profits of $7 billion. Its core product now has 1.8 billion users, and Zuckerberg has shrewdly assembled a portfolio of properties to buttress Facebook. The complete “family of apps” includes the photo-sharing tool Instagram and the communications service WhatsApp, plus two homegrown apps, Facebook Messenger and Facebook Groups. In addition, Zuckerberg believes the company’s Oculus virtual-reality headset represents the next way people will communicate with one another.

Facebook’s immense accomplishments already have conferred superstar status on Zuckerberg, inviting comparisons to the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos. At 32, he is as fresh-faced and casually dressed as a decade ago, yet today the Facebook CEO is a celebrity wherever he goes. He huddles with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and the pope. He is photographed jogging in Beijing and Barcelona. (This year he ran his first half-marathon.) Together with his physician wife, Priscilla Chan, he has become one of the world’s most ambitious philanthropists, most recently pledging $3 billion to an initiative with an audacious goal: to cure, prevent, or make manageable all diseases in their children’s lifetime.

Zuckerberg is rightly recognized for his outsize success. Nevertheless, he is surprisingly underappreciated for his business acumen. Yes, he has delegated the commercial aspects of Facebook to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s polished chief operating officer, a Harvard MBA who is 15 years Zuckerberg’s senior. Sandberg’s presence has fostered an “adult supervision” narrative familiar to the Valley. But unlike, say, the Google (GOOGL) founders, who turned over the CEO job to Eric Schmidt for a decade, Zuckerberg has remained chief executive throughout Facebook’s 12-year sprint to greatness. Despite repeated doubts—when Facebook missed the shift to smartphones, when it was thought to have botched its IPO, when it was seen as losing its luster with young people—Zuckerberg has remained the company’s chief product visionary and business strategist. Through bold acquisitions and the articulation of a remarkably constant mission, Zuckerberg has kept Facebook on track in the face of full-frontal assaults from the likes of Google, Twitter (TWTR), Snapchat , and others.

Admirers attribute Zuckerberg’s business success to his inquisitive nature as well as to his relatively grounded approach to technology. “He’s always been a learn-it-all person, to a level that is sometimes maddening, considering how much more I have to learn from him than he does from me,” says Matt Cohler, a venture capitalist at Benchmark and an early Facebook employee who has remained close to Zuckerberg. “He maintains a relentless focus on innovation, but at the same time he’s an applied-science and engineering guy.”

What Zuckerberg has engineered at Facebook is growth that is astounding considering the size of the company. For four years running, it has grown revenues at a 50% clip, while profits have jumped fivefold. Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s stock has followed suit, doubling in two years. In its most recent quarter, Facebook increased its revenues 56% over the year before and its net income 166%. (And yet the stock dipped on the news, as some investors expressed fears the company won’t be able to keep up the scorching pace.)

Growing at scale is the holy grail of business leadership—and this feat alone makes Zuckerberg an easy choice for Fortune’ s Businessperson of the Year for 2016. Facebook’s products are frequently dissected, as are its missteps as a reluctant media titan. (Facebook seems to enjoy the financial fruits of advertising dominance far more than the editorial responsibilities that go with it.)

Yet for all the celebration of Facebook’s success and the adulation of Zuckerberg as a visionary, what’s less well understood is how he goes about his day job as an executive. What makes him so effective as a businessperson? An examination of Zuckerberg’s management approach reveals that his success rests on three pillars: his unique ability to look into the future, his otherworldly consistency, and the business discipline he has nurtured in an industry quite often enamored of bright, shiny objects. A closer look reveals just how levelheaded he has remained over the years.

Being a visionary is harder than it looks.

Mike Vernal graduated from Harvard in 2002, a few months before Zuckerberg arrived on campus, and took a job at Microsoft (MSFT). Five years later he joined Facebook as an engineer, and later rose to head the company’s search, local, and marketplace product groups, reporting to Zuckerberg. Earlier this year he left Facebook to become a venture capitalist—meaning his new job is to find the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Having watched Facebook’s CEO up close, Vernal believes the key to Zuckerberg’s success is his ability to think for the ages while knowing when to go deep. “One of the things that defines Mark is that he takes a very, very long view of things, almost a geological view,” says Vernal. “Most people think day to day or week to week. Mark thinks century to century.” (Indeed, Zuckerberg’s favorite video game is Civilization, which allows players to consider the vast sweep of history while plotting their next move.)

Somewhat less grandiosely, Vernal cites Zuckerberg’s audacious 10-year-and-beyond quest to connect the half of the planet that doesn’t yet use the Internet. Facebook’s plan to do this involves fixed-wing drones that will deliver connectivity from high above the earth. Vernal says Zuckerberg typically has a pile of books on his desk, visible to all through the glass walls that surround it. “For a while there was a book on free-space optical communications,” says Vernal, referring to a technology Facebook is pursuing that will beam signals from the atmosphere. “It is telling about Mark’s personality that he reads a college textbook on free-space optics.”

An introvert given to long stares and awkward silences, Zuckerberg does more than think deeply. Where CEOs with more emotional intelligence rely on their gifts for gab, Facebook’s CEO attributes his management technique to his training as an engineer. “For me engineering comes down to two real principles,” he told a group of Nigerian software developers this summer. The “engineering mind-set,” he said, dictates thinking “of every problem as a system” and breaking down problems “from the biggest stage down to smaller pieces.” Over time, Zuckerberg told his rapt audience in Lagos, “you get to the point where you’re running a company,” itself a complicated system segmented into groups of high-functioning people. “Instead of managing individuals, you’re managing teams. And if you’ve built it well, then it’s not so different from writing code.”

A consistent message helps rally the troops.

Zuckerberg has proved adept at selecting talent, relying on a core of top executives who have been at Facebook for much of its existence. He claims to draw more inspiration from his coterie of senior managers than from any mentor or adviser. While he retains his reputation as a boy-genius coder, in reality Zuckerberg is something of a grinder—a 99% perspiration guy who has surrounded himself with a group of people he respects and with whom he is constantly stress-testing his hypotheses. “Ideas typically do not just come to you,” he said in a 2014 public Q&A session at Facebook. “They happen because you’ve been talking about something or thinking about something and talking to a lot of people about it for a long period of time.”

From such thinking came Zuckerberg’s realization that three broad themes matter most to Facebook: connectivity (his goal of bringing the Internet—and the wonders of Facebook, of course—to those who don’t have it), artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.

What’s more, because he is always pushing, Zuckerberg has shown an ability to recognize big ideas from others early—including when Facebook has been late—and has been able to act with bold conviction to buy what others have created, if necessary. Examples include spending $1 billion to buy photo-sharing site Instagram in 2012; $2 billion for Oculus VR two years later; and $19 billion for WhatsApp, also in 2014. Instagram, with estimated revenues of $2.5 billion this year, already is a runaway success, while at a minimum Oculus and WhatsApp have positioned Facebook to succeed in important areas adjacent to its core product.

One of Facebook’s key business innovations is a “growth team”—today made up of hundreds of people—that designs tactics for various parts of the company, relying on a rigorous set of metrics to gauge success. The unit has broad latitude to weigh in on any aspect of Facebook’s business. “The growth team’s discipline has had as big an impact on Facebook as anything else,” says Vernal, the former top product executive. “The team owns no single product. Instead, it owns any issue that is preventing people from signing up for or using Facebook.”

Silicon Valley companies are now widely replicating the concept of the growth team invented at Facebook.

Patience pays, even for a young company in a hurry.

Facebook has a simple, if grandiose mission: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Zuckerberg, whose wooden public speaking style has improved with practice, is mind-numbingly efficient about slipping the statement into everyday conversation, as well as his speeches and interviews.

The repetition makes for effective external and internal messaging. If something at Facebook can’t be explained by the oft-repeated catchphrase, then it doesn’t fit. Virtual reality has a place because Zuckerberg thinks it’s the next “platform” for communicating, just as the web was when he started Facebook. Spending an outrageous amount of money for WhatsApp—which has challenged Skype as the trendiest free international calling service—was acceptable because it fit into the “open and connected” mantra.

A corollary to staying on message is being patient and disciplined in pursuit of the mission. Zuckerberg was ultra-patient with Instagram, which had no revenues when Facebook bought it but is now booming. He appears to be playing a similarly long game with WhatsApp.

Indeed, Zuckerberg’s achievement in guiding Facebook to where it is today owes as much to what he hasn’t done as to what he has. Unlike Alphabet, Google’s parent, Facebook harbors no separate unit for “moon shots.” It isn’t attempting to reinvent contact lenses or autonomous vehicles. Zuckerberg may have pledged part of his immense wealth to fighting disease—his Facebook stake is worth nearly $50 billion—but his company has no subsidiary attempting to reverse the effects of aging.

So he’s disciplined, collaborative, consistent, generous, and at least outwardly humble. He’s even a progressive role model. When his daughter, Maxima, was born just after Thanksgiving last year, Zuckerberg took a two-month paternity leave.

Zuckerberg is also big on personal goals, having committed in the past to learning Mandarin and this year to designing his own AI-fueled personal assistant, named Jarvis, for his home. He recently told an audience in Rome that through Jarvis he can control the house’s temperature but that “much to the chagrin of my wife,” she cannot, “because it is programmed to only listen to my voice, which is one of the perks of being an engineer.” He added, “I’ll give her access once I’m done.”

As ever, Zuckerberg is determined to build the next cool thing his way, even if it means a little domestic friction.

A version of this article appears in the December 1, 2016 issue of Fortune with the headline “How to Lead Like Zuck.”

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Episode 328

Extra: mark zuckerberg full interview.

Stephen Dubner’s conversation with the Facebook founder and C.E.O., recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “ The Secret Life of a C.E.O. ”

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Episode Transcript

What follows is Stephen Dubner ’s conversation with Facebook founder and C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “ The Secret Life of a C.E.O. ” It was recorded last summer, long before we learned that 50 million Facebook users’ data had been weaponized by political operatives. Facebook has been the subject of intense scrutiny for years now; that’s what happens when you’ve gone from a college dorm startup to a social network with some 2 billion global users. We spoke with Zuckerberg in Chicago in a trailer, outside an event space where he’d just addressed a few hundred very enthusiastic people who serve as group administrators for Facebook user groups. He introduced new software tools that would help them manage their groups.

You may have heard recently that Facebook has been seriously questioning its mission — that it’s trying, or at least it’s saying that it’s trying, to encourage more meaningful social bonds and less partisanship and discord. That movement was essentially launched on this day, at this talk Zuckerberg gave, in Chicago.

Mark ZUCKERBERG: You know, every day I wake up and I just think to myself, “I don’t have much time here on Earth” or “how can I make the greatest positive impact that I can,” and I know that this is a question that a lot of you ask yourselves too — and it’s not always an easy question to answer. Now, the thing that I think we all need to do right now is work to bring people closer together. And I think that this is actually so important that we’re going to change Facebook’s whole mission, as a company, in order to focus on this.

And now here is our conversation, afterward, in that trailer. A trailer whose air conditioning we had to cut for a quiet audio recording. So picture yourself there: an un-air-conditioned trailer, in Chicago, in the summer, with Mark Zuckerberg. You there with us? Great… here we go:

Stephen DUBNER: Hey! Hey, how’s it going? Really nice to meet you. ZUCKERBERG: You, too. Good to meet you. DUBNER: That was really good. You like it? Because it’s a whole set of things that you didn’t use to ever do. ZUCKERBERG: Yeah, I think it’s important for me to get better at communicating. DUBNER: Oh my God, the people were so excited when you talked about the tools. Did you expect that level of excitement from them? ZUCKERBERG: Probably not that level. But I think people are always most excited about the really concrete things that you’re doing. You can talk about the lofty vision and mission and strategy. I actually find you’re lucky if you can get people very excited about that, even if they agree with what direction you are going, because it’s just more abstract. But when you get into a very concrete work that you’re doing, then that’s what I think really energizes people. DUBNER: I have to say — I’ll be honest with you: I don’t really use Facebook. ZUCKERBERG: That’s okay. DUBNER: I mean we use it — Freakonomics, we use it. But I’ll be brutally honest: I don’t want more friends. Or, that sounds bad, too — ZUCKERBERG: But do you want to stay connected with the friends you already have? DUBNER: No — well yes, but — ZUCKERBERG: You don’t?! DUBNER: Well, honestly, it’s tricky. Because when you’re trying to get a lot of stuff done — I mean, I don’t mean to sound like a total misanthrope. All I’m saying is, I don’t use it a lot. But that made me want to join every group in there, and then I realized that I’d have to quit my job and do nothing but find rare birds and go fishing and support these military families. ZUCKERBERG: Well, the point isn’t to join every group, but I think it’s really important that people have one or two or three communities in their lives that they really care about. And I think when you have the absence of that, that can lead to real social issues — individually and then for society overall. So, of course these groups, in order to be meaningful, need to span online and offline. There are certain things that you just can’t do online. But the thing that I think is so meaningful and interesting and what we’ve seen is that they do! The people do plan events to come together in person, and the support really does expand out into the physical world. And a lot of these groups are just things that wouldn’t have been possible physically. I mean we talked about groups for people suffering from rare diseases and almost by definition if you have a rare disease, there probably isn’t someone in your area who has that. So this might be possible for the first time in human history to be able to come together and share your experience of having that condition. I think that’s very powerful. But I think everyone needs to be a part of a few communities that are meaningful to them in order to have that support structure. DUBNER: So I don’t mean to rain on that parade. I’d love to talk for just a minute about the net effect of Facebook, or social media, or social networking on, let’s say, happiness, to pick a word, or satisfaction. I think there’s a lot of good conversation going on that G.D.P. is a ridiculously bad measure of well-being — it’s way too narrow, it favors all kinds of silly stuff — and that people are talking about either gross national happiness, or some slightly more sophisticated version of that. But it’s really hard to measure it, one; and two, know what causes what. So with Facebook, per se, the upsides that you especially talk about in there, today, are potentially massive, right? Helping communities that wouldn’t be able to find each other, or even identify each other. But I also do worry about the potential downside, which is that, I have teenagers, and there’s always the notion that what people show of themselves online is often them at their best, most buoyant, happy selves. And if I see that and it’s a Friday night, and I’m not with them, I’m thinking, “Man, what’s wrong with me?” And I’m curious if you think about the net effect, costs and benefits on humankind, which is a big, impossible question, but I’m guessing you thought about it. ZUCKERBERG: That’s very important to us. So the way that I think about this is that technology amplifies human capacity, right. So there are good parts of people, and there are bad parts of people. I believe that on balance people are good, and that therefore amplifying that has positive effects. There’s content portrays people at their happiest, and then there’s content — like a lot of sensational news in some cases — that portrays things as much worse than they are. And I just think that the reality is that both have positives and negatives. There are people who like to point to the negatives of either, because they’re trying to make a point. I don’t think that that’s right, right? There’s a lot of research that shows that the more connected we are overall, the happier we are, and the healthier we are because of that. So it can’t be that talking to your friends when they’re happy is bumming you out, and then reading news that’s down is bumming you out even more, right? But being an engaged citizen also is not always fun. And a lot of the part of the mission that we’ve been working on is making the world more open and connected. So the connected part is about being connected to more people, and there is generally a lot of research that shows that that is positive for people. But I think that being open is also very important for society. But it can be challenging. Confronting truths or perspectives that don’t fit with ours don’t necessarily make our lives easier in the near term. But I think it’s a healthy thing and an important thing for us to do both as individuals and as society in order to move forward. DUBNER: So following on that, how do you bring those two notions together which is the fact that we love to connect with people that we either have something in common with or maybe a shared mission, with, as you noted, it’s really important to at least think about or understand a little bit about what people who don’t think like you, why they think like that, and how you can get along. So this is the silo issue, and it exists everywhere and it probably always has and always will. I’m just really curious, it’s interesting: a lot of the groups in there are tribes, and it’s a word that people use kind of positively, and also a lot of them, let’s be honest, they’re kind of — you want a water? ZUCKERBERG: No, it’s cool. DUBNER: You sure? ZUCKERBERG: It’s just very warm in here. And now that you’ve turned the air conditioning off… DUBNER: Well, yeah, that’s our fault… ZUCKERBERG: Let’s go with it. DUBNER: All right. And a lot of the groups in there were about activities. So of course everybody’s allowed to have hobbies that are totally orthogonal to everybody else. But, when it comes to political or social or gender or other affiliations, how do you think about weakening the silos? ZUCKERBERG: So we’ve both read and just tried to understand as best we can a lot of research around how to promote positive discourse. So there are a few things that I think are pretty interesting that most people may not know. So the first is that if you want to have a debate where people engage productively, the first and most important thing is to first connect with that person over something that you have in common. Right, so if you just go into an internet comment thread and you start debating gun control, that’s probably not going to be super productive. I mean, it can be in some cases. But it’s easy to dehumanize the other people, think about them as not human, not empathize with them. So a lot of what I think social networks can do well, and these communities, are first you connect over something that you have in common. So you recognize that the other person is a person. And I think communities in that way act as a jumping off point. DUBNER: Do you try to orchestrate that? I’ve read about your efforts to do that and the research that that’s based on. ZUCKERBERG: Yeah, so we’re trying to work on this, but I think building communities is one of the ways that you can. So a group might come together because they like fishing. But then they go connect over other things, and they debate other things, and they find that, “Hey, we agree on other things; we disagree on them; but now we can have productive and empathetic discussions, because we’re all people, and we recognize our common humanity.” In terms of just encouraging good positive discourse overall, there are some best practices. For example, one of the ideas that people suggest all the time is, “Well, why don’t you just show people the opposite perspective?” Right, so you have an article that comes up in your news feed about, take gun control, the topic we were just talking about. And a lot of people are like, “Well, why don’t you just show an article from the other perspective?” Well, it turns out if you don’t do this well, if you just show the other perspective, it actually just entrenches people’s belief in their original opinion. There’s a lot of confirmation bias that labels the other opinion as “other.” So you start to tune it out. What you really want to do is not just present another viewpoint, but you want to give people a range of viewpoints. Because people are smart. And when they have the full picture of what is going on, they can make a good rational assessment for themselves about where they want to be on the spectrum, and what they believe. But it’s really important to not just tell people, “Hey, here’s the other viewpoint, you should look at this.” What people need is the whole picture. So I think that good journalism does that; it doesn’t just try to show one side of a story, but it tries to give the full picture. And when that doesn’t happen, then we can help play a role of at least trying to show a number of different pieces of media that might in sum give the whole picture. DUBNER: So how much do you care about, or maybe love, social science research, the kind of insights that give rise to these kind of possibilities. So I’ve tried to figure it out, and I’ve read a bit. I know you studied psych for a while, and I know that you hire a lot of— ZUCKERBERG: I wasn’t at Harvard for very long time, but I was technically a psychology major. DUBNER: And I don’t know if you know Sudhir Venkatesh , a sociologist you hired? He’s a good buddy of mine. ZUCKERBERG: Yeah! He wrote Gang Leader for a Day . It’s a great book, I read it. DUBNER: Anyway, because Sudhir was in … Yeah, anyway. So Sudhir’s amazing, and I love the notion that someone who thinks the way he thought as an academic and as a writer and a scholar — his insights are being applied to something like this, which is accessible to everybody. So talk about how you seek out those kind of things, whether it’s the people, per se, or the research, and how you make it actionable. Because I think I’d like to argue that social science research is having its golden era; I hope it lasts forever. But people didn’t really apply this kind of thinking very much in firms and governments 20 or 30 years ago. It’s really happening, so I want to hear about how you make that happen. ZUCKERBERG: Well understanding how people are using our services — both in terms of what they want, so we can provide services that meet people’s needs, and understanding what’s good — are really important domains that we want to work on. So we take data analytics and data science very seriously as a company; I think it’s one of the core strategic things that we’ve done well that other companies are seeking to emulate now. But especially because of the context of what we do as a social system, it’s especially important I think to understand. DUBNER: Who are some heroes of yours from that realm — like Bowling Alone and Bob Putnam ? I’m just curious like what you’ve read or thought over the years. ZUCKERBERG: Putnam’s work shares a lot of the themes that I was just talking about today. He wrote some of the seminal work on community membership and did some of the longest ranging studies on that. It’s an interesting question of where you draw the line between what is social science and what is economics. But I think recently Raj Chetty ‘s work is incredibly interesting opportunity and mobility. We’re doing some interesting work together, and we try to team up with folks who are doing interesting work. There’s interesting research now that shows that the average American has fewer than three close friends who they would turn to in a crisis. So one of the questions that I asked inside our company, and I started a team to work on this is, “Well, can we build some products or services that make it so that the average person has one more close friend?” So not just helping them connect to more people who they know, but, if you could do that, then that seems like a very meaningful change that you could make in the world — one thing that I’m doing this year is traveling around and trying to just see how people are thinking about communities and their work, and — DUBNER: You’re going to all 50 states, I understand? ZUCKERBERG: I’m going to 30; I’m going to the ones I haven’t been to yet. It’s interesting so far. But one of the things that I’ve found is that there’s this myth that I think a lot of people have; that if other people in other places just had better information, then they’d make better decisions. And I’ve generally found that that is not true. You know we all lack some information. Of course we can all make better decisions if we had perfect information. But for the most part, a bigger influence is actually who you know, who your friends are, who your family are, and how they help you filter the information that you have. I can give a few examples of just how … this is a really poignant example. When I was in Ohio, I sat down with a group of heroin addicts, and one of the things that was really interesting is when you’re going through recovery, the first thing you have to do is detox, of course. But then after that, the next thing you have to do is basically get new friends. And it turns out if you remain friends with anyone who you were using with before, then you are very likely to end up back using heroin and endangering your life. So it turns out it’s not that these people don’t know that it’s bad. Or that they don’t want to end up addicted to it. But it just is that the people who you’re friends with — having those close friends, the three or four folks in your life are just so important. Another example that has really stuck with me is when I visited a juvenile detention center. And one of the facts there that’s just mind-blowing is if you go to a juvenile detention center … and some of the kids are there because they committed what you’d call a crime, they stole something or hurt someone. But some of them were there just because they misbehaved in class a little bit. And going to a juvenile detention center dramatically increases your chance of becoming a criminal once you get out, because what you’re essentially doing in that center is building a social network that reinforces itself negatively. All the examples that you’re getting are other people who either have criminal behavior or are misbehaving, so kids who who might have just been okay, a little not behaving as well as they should have in class, are getting all the wrong lessons and friends. So, making it so that we can have a positive social network I think is actually one of the most important things that we can do for growing opportunity in society. That’s certainly what Raj Chetty’s work is. So that’s definitely a big thing that we study and think about how we can improve. DUBNER: Let me ask you something in his work that he found that was surprising and interesting: do you know about the moving to opportunity research that was done years ago? And all the first round of scholars that looked at it, they said it didn’t work, and he came back with a colleague and found out that actually it did work if the kids were younger when they moved, because by the time you’re 15 or 16, your patterns are pretty set. You think school sucks or you don’t. But if kids were 9 and under, I think it really worked. So to that end— ZUCKERBERG: Actually he found a linear correlation. So if you moved when you were 9 you got half the impact of moving when you’re born, and if you moved when you’re 18 that’s kind of the end of the impact. DUBNER: Right. So given that and given that the communities you’re building are presumably mostly for adults, I gather, what do you think about that? ZUCKERBERG: Well, people over the age of 13 can use Facebook. DUBNER: Okay, this is a corollary to a question I often think: people talk about early education — and I’m really interested in the project you’re interested in, because I’ve known people who’ve done that. I just think that’s a smart way to think about it: use technology to customize because people learn differently. People have different abilities and so on. But even when you talk about good early education, the kids who end up doing worst in this country and most other countries are already doing bad by the time they’re 1 or 2; they’re born into circumstances that are just really, really hard to surmount. So, without putting all the world’s problems on you and Facebook — ZUCKERBERG: This is what Priscilla , my wife, focuses on. She’s running a school which is focused on the intersection between health and early childhood education. She’s a doctor and she wanted to help kids. And then through her pediatrics program realized that education and health are so intertwined, and that you need to start educating the parents, from the time that they’re pregnant, about what the right behaviors are, and then you basically want the kids in the school or in a program, or at least to have good habits being built from birth, and have them involved in that as quickly as possible. When we think about education, we often think about concepts like math or reading. But very early on, when you’re learning how to walk, health is completely intertwined with education, and then of course as you go up through your education — it’s hard to learn math if you can’t sleep at home, or there are different issues. So there are all these interesting trade-offs — you could do a whole podcast with her talking about — she has students who come in and who are in an environment at home where they can’t sleep as well. So she has to make this trade-off — they have a nap time during the day, and if a kid is sleeping and just sleeps for four hours instead of the hour and a half, does she wake them up to do math, or does she let them sleep? And I think a lot of the time what ends up being the case is that the health is the precursor to education, so you let them sleep. But they’re totally intertwined in the way that you’re talking about. DUBNER: So Facebook is obviously not a government. You don’t have an army as far as I know. Do you? Right? ZUCKERBERG: No, we do not. DUBNER: But in some ways, it’s become a nation-state in the way that we used to think about nation-states. Except that it doesn’t provide those services, and it doesn’t use monopoly of force and so on. But what I mean is you probably have — ZUCKERBERG: Well, it’s a community. DUBNER: Okay. But it’s a global community, organized by interests, activities, and it’s voluntary. So to me it’s — right, nation state is an exaggeration. But what I’m getting at is this: governments throughout history and especially now, try their best, I would argue, to help their people. And they often don’t do a very good job, because the structure of government turns out to be pretty suboptimal and the incentives kind of weird. In a way, Facebook, it strikes me, has more leverage over how people actually organize and live their lives, right? The choices they’re able to make, the information they’re able to get hold of. And so I’m curious how you think about that. I know you were an accidental C.E.O. and an accidental social entrepreneur, but it strikes me that you’re working really hard to take this massive accidental enterprise really seriously and optimize it for the most number of people. So I guess my question is big and lumpy and impossible, but I really just want to know what that feels like, because, look, I don’t know how to read what you’re trying to accomplish here. You’re this incredibly smart and accomplished young guy with this incredibly big and impressive company. And maybe you’re just trying to make it bigger and better and that’s it. But it doesn’t read that way to me. When I read your letter to the global community — ZUCKERBERG: Yeah, well, I never started this to build a company. DUBNER: Yeah. But I wouldn’t have — knowing what I know about you, if I looked at you 10 years ago — I also wouldn’t have thought that you were necessarily in it to help fix society or help make society better. Maybe I’m just wrong. ZUCKERBERG: Well, I think at each point you try to do the best you can with the position that you’re in. So 10 years ago, I was just trying to help connect people at colleges and a few schools. And that was a basic need, where I looked around at the internet, and there were services for a lot of things that you wanted. You could find music; you could find news; you could find information, but you couldn’t find and connect with the people that you cared about, which, as people, is actually the most important thing. So that seemed like a pretty big hole that needed to get filled, and maybe it’s more functional and more basic, but that was the thing that needed to happen. Now you know we look out at the world and we say, “Okay, we’ve been focused on making the world more open and connected.” And I always thought that that would be enough to solve a lot of problems by itself. And for some it has, but the world is today more divided than I would have expected for the level of openness and connection that we have today. So now I just believe that we have a responsibility to also work on that. So you can paraphrase what we’re working on now is, “open, connected, and together.” So that is basically the idea that we’re talking about, when we say bringing the world closer together. Here’s another way to think about it. There are lots of different issues and things that help bind people together and make us stronger as a whole than the sum of our parts. A huge part of that is the economy and our jobs and all that. And Facebook is a big player there, but we’re a relatively small part of the overall world economy. But when it comes to helping people build communities, I’m actually not sure that there are many other institutions in the world that stand for building communities and have the tools to be able to empower people at as large scale to do that. So that just strikes me as something that’s, “Okay, if that’s a unique opportunity that we have, then we also have a responsibility to go do that.” And that’s a little different than where we were 10 years ago, when there were many social networks that were bigger than us. We were just at schools and all that. DUBNER: The tools that you talked about today; obviously you’re giving some user data to the users. What does that represent in the path of Facebook sharing its data generally. And I realize that what you’re giving to the users is useful. I love that when you announced them one lady actually said, “Statistics. Woo!” I’d never actually heard people cheer for that. ZUCKERBERG: I missed that. But that makes me smile. DUBNER: Yeah it was awesome. And obviously you’re not sharing, you know, income— ZUCKERBERG: It’s aggregated. It’s insights into how people are using groups, right, so basic demographics — DUBNER: And who wouldn’t want that, right? If you’re the admin. ZUCKERBERG: Well you need to present it in a way that’s actually useful. DUBNER: Yeah, but I’m sure there are people who want you to share much more data about your users. Yes? ZUCKERBERG: Well I think one of the interesting challenges that you find running a company or a community at scale is there are people who want things that are completely conflicting. So there are certain people who want us to share more information, and then there are a lot of people who really don’t. For some of these social decisions that we have to make, I find that the right place to be is when you’re getting yelled at from both sides equally. And you try to just make the best decision that you can on this. But, both parts have good arguments. Of course, privacy is extremely important, and people engage and share their context and feel free to connect because they know that their privacy is going to be protected. On the other hand, if you’re trying to enable people to build communities, giving them some insights into how people engage in their communities in an anonymized way that that isn’t sharing anything about the individuals and the communities, can help them do their job, and help bring more people together, and help people’s lives as well. So you try to just do the best that you can and know that there’s not always a simple and optimal solution. And another dynamic that’s interesting is that sometimes the balance of what people want shifts over time and that enables opportunities to do more in one direction or the other, that wouldn’t have made sense before. DUBNER: There’s also, as you’ve pointed out, people don’t know what they want. We’re really bad at predicting or — ZUCKERBERG: Oh, I don’t know; I don’t believe that! DUBNER: Well in the revealed preferences, in what people actually do, you can see what they want. But if you ask people what they would like, the social science research at least says that declared preferences, there turns out to usually be a really big gap between that and revealed. No? ZUCKERBERG: Well, I would say that in a lot of these discussions that I have, people focus on what we as Facebook are doing. The real secret to why this works well is because we focus on giving everyone else as much power as possible. DUBNER: What do you mean by that. Meaning just give users power to use it as they wish? ZUCKERBERG: Yeah, give people the freedom to share as much as as you can; give people the ability to get access to as much opportunity as possible. And there’s a whole spectrum on this. First, in order to be able to use a tool like this, you need to have access to the internet. Which is something that we take for granted here in the U.S., but more than half of the world doesn’t have access to the internet. So we work on basic things like improving the business model of telecom operators. Or we’re designing solar powered planes to beam down access to the Internet, because that’s a basic thing. Then once you have the internet, there’s the whole legal framework. We are very active in advocating in many countries to give people the freedom to share more, and express more of what they want. The U.S. is somewhat of an outlier on having constitutionally protected freedom of speech in a way that very few other countries do. Every other country has many more restrictions on what you can say than you can in the U.S. So that gets in the way of people’s freedom, and we are active on pushing on that. And then only when you get through these basic foundational and legal frameworks, do you get into the tool. Which is, in the U.S. people can have the freedom to say what they want to anyone who they want, but that may not help you so much if you don’t have a tool that actually enables you to reach other people with your opinion. So that’s a thing that Facebook and the internet have really worked to change over the last 15 years. Now we really are in a world where anyone for the most part can write something and share it, and if it resonates, it’ll get shared widely, and it can start to change opinion broadly. But in many ways, that ability is the practical arm of free speech. That just didn’t exist before. But there’s this whole spectrum of things that you need to do, and that, that’s the thing that we’re hugely committed to. That’s why when we rolled out the mission today, the basic idea behind it and the vision, is to bring the world closer together. But the reason why that isn’t the whole mission is because it was really important to me that the mission focused on empowering other people. So the mission actually is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, because there’s no way that we’re going to do this, no matter what we do — you can ask me all the questions you want about what we’re going to do, but it’s actually going to be other people doing this, and we succeed when we empower other people. DUBNER: Now a cynic would say, “Well, sure it’s in Facebook’s interest. The bigger they build a global community, the bigger and better the company is.” Which is not untrue, but it’s the prerogative of every company to grow as big and as profitable as they can. So let’s say that someone puts on their “I doubt the do-gooder part of you” hat. How do you respond to that? ZUCKERBERG: I think a lot of people just can’t get out of their own way. So I think for a lot of companies and governments, they would do better by giving people more freedom, and they don’t for whatever reason. So you may be right that it is strategically the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is doing what they should do. So I just want to make sure from the mission of the company on down to how we execute and think about our strategy that that’s always front and center. And a lot of times people like to think about, “Well what is the impact that we can have by improving this product?” I really want to train our organization always to think about what is the impact that we can have by giving these people more power and freedom to go do what they want. So this just goes back to your original question before around, “Do you believe that people can make good decisions for themselves?” And I deeply do. I really think that things end up better when you give— DUBNER: I don’t mean to imply that people can’t make good decisions for themselves, although on some dimensions I would argue they can’t. Like with diet, with health particularly. I think you’ve written a little bit about this, that the leading causes of death in the rich world are all essentially self-inflicted. Or at least a lack of optimizing how you take care of yourself. And you could say that people think the tradeoff is worth it. ZUCKERBERG: I’m not sure I’d say that. DUBNER: That the tradeoff is worth it? ZUCKERBERG: No, that the largest causes are self-inflicted. I mean, cancer… DUBNER: Cancer truly T.B.D., because we really don’t know yet, about most cancers, what causes them. That’s the problem. The environmental causes and behavioral causes, I wish we knew, because then we wouldn’t have as much cancer. But cardiovascular — just take the biggest one — ZUCKERBERG: It’s also largely a function of age. DUBNER: It’s true. It’s true. And look — ZUCKERBERG: I’ll debate you on this one point. DUBNER: All right. And one reason why we have more cancer now than we should is because people are living longer, not dying as early from cardiovascular deaths, which is great. There’s always a silver lining. But the economist Gary Becker from the University of Chicago, years ago, he was the guy that started all of this in terms of turning economics into a more interesting social science. And he argued once that all deaths are suicides to some degree. Because none of us actually really optimize staying alive long, because life’s too fun and interesting and challenging for that. So I think we all make trade-offs all the time, and I think that that’s what being human is about, and it’s maybe fun. No? You’re shaking your head. ZUCKERBERG: I disagree with that, too. DUBNER: Yeah? Tell me why. ZUCKERBERG: Well, I think that having a sense of purpose is the thing that brings us both happiness and health. So if you’re framing it as “doing stuff that’s fun leads you to your demise,” I think there is a lot of research that would suggest the opposite. DUBNER: Yeah, I agree with that. Fun meaning cheeseburgers and French fries and not taking care of oneself. That’s what I mean by fun. That’s a shallow version of fun. All right. So let me just ask you: I loved the Reid Hoffman conversation in that piece . ZUCKERBERG: Yeah, that was fun. DUBNER: It was really interesting, and I loved how he framed it. And you were obviously really good talking with him. You said something on there that I wanted to ask you about. How many versions — or whatever the proper noun would be — of Facebook are running at any given time? And just explain that to people who use it, and what that idea represents. ZUCKERBERG: Sure. So one of the basic strategies of our company is to learn as quickly as we can. That is more important to us than any specific strategy of, “Okay, here’s how we’re going to build the best messaging app, or here’s how we’re going to build the best news feed,” is building a company that is just agile and learns as quickly as possible from what people are telling us. So the best way to learn is to basically try things out and get feedback. So if you just have one version of Facebook running, then that constrains how much people can react to. So we build this whole framework that allows people within the company, any engineer, to change some code, create a new branch of what Facebook is, and ship that to some number of people. Maybe 10,000, some small portion of the community in order to get good feedback from that. And there are a bunch of rules around a bunch of things that you can’t ship. DUBNER: And how is it related? I assume that if I’m the engineer and I want to do that, I do it with someone, with conversation and approval. ZUCKERBERG: Some, there are definitely guidelines. There are things that, if what you’re doing is sensitive to people’s information at all, then of course there are a bunch of checkpoints that you need to do before doing that. But people try out different ideas for how to suggest you better friends, or suggest you better communities, and that doesn’t need to go through a lot of process of the company; people can just try those out, and we’re trying out hundreds of different versions of things like that. And the idea is that cuts through red tape at the company. So now a given engineer, instead of having to get their manager and then their manager’s manager and then me on board with changing the app, they can just do it. And then at the end of that test, they get all this feedback back that is both quantitative — so how their version of Facebook performed on everything that we care about: how connected do people feel; how much do they feel informed; how happier; all these different things — and then we get qualitative feedback back as well. And if their version is an improvement, then we roll that in, and then that becomes part of the trunk version of Facebook that now everyone else is measured against. So now every day, we’re running lots of different versions to see what’s best and what people respond to. But again it gets back to this strategy, which is the real company strategy is to learn as quickly as possible what we need to do in order to bring the world closer together. DUBNER: How about a couple lightning-round fast questions. What’s one story that your family always tells about you? ZUCKERBERG: That’s a good question. You’d have to ask them. DUBNER: But you probably know it too. It’s like, “Oh yeah there was a time that Mark did—,” because I love you know, I love the stories you talk about with Reid. ZuckNet was awesome. I also love that the snowball fight game, where you could have a real snowball fight but it’s a lot more— ZUCKERBERG: Yeah. I think my sisters were happy enough to play the games that I programmed growing up, because it was better than what we would do physically. So they prefer playing a snowball fight game, or some strategy game that I made, even if the graphics were terrible, and the game wasn’t that good, because I was still learning how to program; I was like 12 or 13 or 14. They’d prefer that to getting chased around the house with a Super Soaker or something like that. So there’s that. I think my dad has a lot of fun stories about how he got me into technology. And he’s a dentist, but he was always very focused. He took a lot of pride in being the first dentist in the area who did digital X-rays instead of physically. He was just such a geek, and he loves this stuff. And he didn’t really know how to program, but he was just like, “Mark, don’t you think this is cool?” So that stuff I thought was pretty good. DUBNER: You obviously have to make a lot of decisions all the time and there are a lot of different ways to make decisions, and deciding to not do something is often much more important in retrospect than deciding to do it. So other than deciding not to sell Facebook early on — which I’m guessing was at least a little tempting — what’s the best decision you ever made to not do something, or not pursue something? ZUCKERBERG: So you’re asking about a discrete, big decision, but I actually think the most important thing is what decisions and what process, on a day to day basis, you choose to let people have the freedom to do, and just not get involved with. So a huge part of how Facebook works is giving a large amount of freedom to our engineers, the company, and to people who use the product to make with it what they will, and trusting people to do that. So there’s this balance of how much is it going to be my ideas and my will, versus the people around us and the company. And I think having some restraint there ends up being very important. DUBNER: Was that hard for you to get to, or? ZUCKERBERG: I think it’s hard every day. When you’re running something, you of course have the ability to make as many of the decisions as you would like. So the real art I think is not when you know that you have someone who is a superstar, who is going to make great decisions, but deciding to let people do things that you disagree with, because on principle you know it’s just going to free up more creativity and people will feel like there’s more potential to try different things in the future that may be better, if you let them go do those things, even if you disagree with them. DUBNER: That’s really admirable. I would think it’s hard. I think most people would have a really hard time doing that. ZUCKERBERG: I believe a lot in giving people freedom. DUBNER: I believe; I do. I mean I believe in the belief, but I just think that’s a hard thing to do. All right. Last question quickly: if you weren’t doing this, if this hadn’t worked out, if MySpace had become Facebook, what do you think you’d be doing? ZUCKERBERG: That is a really interesting question. I’ve always really cared about the idea of connecting people and bringing people together. And the way that you do that is different at different points in history. Another way that I think about it is: if Facebook didn’t happen, you’d just drop me in a desert now what would I do? I believe that technology is a huge lever for improving people’s lives. It’s a great thing that an individual can sit down and construct something and share it with millions of people around the world; almost nothing else other than code and technology gives you that ability to do that. Maybe producing media on top of that technology, but the technology is the platform for that. But today a lot more people message each other than just use social networks, which is why we’re very focused on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp as well. So if you got started 13 years ago in a dorm, the right thing to do is to build a website for social networking. Ten years ago, or seven years ago, maybe the right thing to do is build a mobile app for social networking. Now I think one of the most important things that you do is build tools for more private communication, because people have the power to do that. I think that line will always be shifting, and I would bet that you know at any moment that you would want to get started, you probably could. And there are always going to be new ways that people want to share and connect and feel supported, and there are always things to build. I’m just a big believer in technology, and bringing people together is two of the most important levers that we have to make progress as humanity. DUBNER: All right. No offense — and I know it’s hot in here and you’ve got to go — but you really didn’t answer my question, which is just literally what you think, if this had gone very differently, like you couldn’t do it differently — ZUCKERBERG: So differently that I wouldn’t want to be an engineer any more? My answer is that I would build whatever the next thing is. I still think you can care about the mission, but Facebook is not a one product company at this point. And you know there are new social network companies that get started all the time. I’m not sure exactly how I would think about it. DUBNER: So there was no impulse to become a dentist, for instance? ZUCKERBERG: No, that stuff makes me queasy. So I never had the whole doctor thing. And Priscilla’s got that covered for the family. But no, I believe a lot in technology. I think that there are lots of different ways to get started. Our path as Facebook I think is good proof that the line is not clear. I started it as a website for Harvard students to build a community there. There was no news feed, none of the stuff that you think of as the most important parts of what Facebook are today. So you start with something; you find a niche; and then you can grow it to serve more people in that way. That’s what I care about. DUBNER: All right. ZUCKERBERG: Thank you. It was really fun. DUBNER: Yeah. Thank you very much. ZUCKERBERG: Alright, we gotta get some A.C. in here.

Freakonomics Radio  is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes  Alison Hockenberry ,  Merritt Jacob ,  Greg Rosalsky ,  Stephanie Tam,  Max Miller,  Harry Huggins,  and  Brian Gutierrez . For this series, the sound design is by David Herman, with help from Dan Dzula. The music throughout the episode was composed by  Luis Guerra . You can subscribe to  Freakonomics Radio  on  Apple Podcasts , or  wherever you get your podcasts . You can also find us on  Twitter ,  Facebook , or via email at [email protected].

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Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3

In a rare interview, meta’s ceo dives into where ai is going next, the new quest 3 headset, and his ongoing rivalry with elon musk..

By Alex Heath and Nilay Patel

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What motivates Mark Zuckerberg these days?

It’s a question I posed at the end of our interview last week, after we had spent an hour talking about Threads, his vision for how generative AI will reshape Meta’s apps , the Quest 3 , and other news from the company’s Connect conference .

“We went through a period where a lot of what we needed to do was tackle and navigate some important social issues, and I think that that required a somewhat different style,” he told me, alluding to his “Senator, we sell ads” era. “And then we went through a period where we had some quite big business challenges: handling in a recession and revenue not coming in the way that we thought and needing to do layoffs.”

“But now I think we’re squarely back in developing really innovative products, especially because of some of the innovations in AI. That, in some ways, plays exactly to my favorite style of running a company.”

This time last year, Meta’s reputation — and by extension, Zuckerberg’s — couldn’t have been in a more different place. Doubts were swirling about whether its ads business would recover and if spending billions of dollars on a far-out metaverse strategy made any sense. It wasn’t clear if Elon Musk was going to actually buy Twitter, which ended up giving Zuckerberg the opening to build his own competitor with Threads. A potential cage match between the two billionaires certainly wasn’t on my bingo card at the time, but here we are.

That cage match isn’t going to happen after all. ( Do you think Musk was ever serious about it? “You’d have to ask him.”) But Zuckerberg is dead set on Threads reaching a billion people, even with reports about its early spike in engagement falling off. He’s bullish on decentralized social media, which has the potential to reshape the power dynamic between platforms and their users for the better.

In the near term, he’s perhaps the most excited about infusing WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook with generative AI. Practically, that looks like lots of chatbots and some clever creative cools that will only get richer over time. In the not-too-distant future, he sees AI intersecting with the metaverse in a powerful way, though the exact timeline for when headsets hit the mainstream remains hazy.

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After spending the past five years as a wartime CEO, Zuckerberg is getting back to basics, and he clearly feels good about it. “I think we’ve done a lot of good things,” he told me. “I think we need to make sure that they stay good. I think that there’s a lot of work that needs to happen on making sure the balance of all that is right.”

“But for the next wave of my life and for the company — but also outside of the company with what I’m doing at CZI [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative] and some of my personal projects — I define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with.”

Listen to Decoder , a show hosted by The Verge ’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe  here !

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mark, I have to be honest. Not long ago, I was thinking we may be doing this as like a post-fight interview in Las Vegas, right outside of the Octagon after you get out of a fight with Elon .

Maybe next year. Not Elon, but someone. I want to keep competing, but I just need to find someone who asks me.

Do you think he was ever serious about fighting?

I don’t know. You’d have to ask him. But I don’t know. I just really enjoy doing it as a sport. For me, it’s a competition, and it’s a sport. I mean, I love doing it. I train with a bunch of guys, and you know, I definitely want to compete more, but we’ll see. 

Are there any other tech CEO rivals you would want to fight if you could, or have you moved on from that?

I think it’ll be more fun to fight someone who actually fights. 

Who takes it seriously?

Settling tech business rivalries by combat… you don’t think that’s going to become a thing now?

No, I don’t think so. I think that’s not generally the direction that our society is heading.

Probably for the best.

It probably is for the best. I think a little bit of a channel to get some aggression out is good. I think the one that was proposed with Elon could have been fun, but it’s okay. 

If he came back to you and said, “I’ll fight on your terms, you pick the venue,” would you still do it?

I don’t think it’ll happen. 

Fair. I agree with you.

There’s sort of a valorization where people look at this stuff and are like, “Oh, I could do that.” But I mean you have to train. It’s very technical. It’s very fun, very intellectual.

When I was a lot younger, I used to fence competitively. A lot of the striking aspects — I mean, obviously, it’s different because, I mean, [in] fencing, you’re playing for points, right? So when you get a touch, the sequence is done, whereas here, you have to worry about being countered and all that. It’s very intellectual. 

I really enjoyed thinking about all the different combos and moves and all that. There’s a period where you’re ramping up and learning all the basic stuff before you can get to the intellectual part of it. But once you’re there… I don’t know, it’s super fun. I love doing it with friends.

Your mind doesn’t just shut off when you’re doing it? You actually find it to be mentally stimulating?

Last year, when Elon was close to taking over Twitter, I asked if you had any advice for him. I’m not going to ask you to give him advice this time, but a lot has changed in a year. You’ve got Threads now. I’d love to get into why you did Threads when you did and the approach that you took and kind of when you made that decision because it seemed like it happened pretty quickly.

Yeah. You know, I’ve always thought that the aspiration of Twitter — to build this, you know, text-based discussion — should be a billion-person social app, right? There are certain kinds of fundamental social experiences that, you know, I look at them, and I’m just like, “Okay, like if I were running that, I could scale that to reach a billion people.”

And that’s one of the reasons why, over time, we’ve done different acquisitions and why we’ve considered them. 

You tried to buy Twitter way back in the day, right?

Yeah, we had conversations . I think this was, gosh, this was, I think, when Jack was leaving the first time. And look, I get it. I mean, different entrepreneurs have different goals for what they want to do, and some people want to run their companies independently, and that’s cool.

It’s good that there’s sort of a diversity of different outcomes. But I guess Twitter was sort of plodding along for a while before Elon came, and I think the rate of change in the product was pretty slow, right? So it just didn’t seem like they were on the trajectory that would maximize their potential, and then with Elon coming in, I think there was certainly an opportunity to change things up, and he has, right?

I mean, he’s definitely a change agent, right? I think it’s still not clear exactly what trajectory it’s on, but I do think he’s been pretty polarizing, so I think that the chance that it sort of reaches the full potential on the trajectory that it’s on is… I don’t know. I guess I’m probably less optimistic or just think there’s less of a chance now than there was before.

But I guess just watching all this play out, it just kind of reminded me and rekindled the sense that someone should build a version of this that can be more ubiquitous. And, you know, I look at some of the things around it… I think these days people just want… Well, let’s put it this way. A lot of the conversation around social media is around information and the utility aspect, but I think an equally important part of designing any product is how it makes you feel, right? What’s the kind of emotional charge of it, and how do you come away from that feeling?

I think Instagram is generally kind of on the happier end of the spectrum. I think Facebook is sort of in the middle because it has happier moments, but then it also has sort of harder news and things like that that I think tend to just be more critical and maybe, you know, make people see some of the negative things that are going on in the world. And I think Twitter indexes very strongly on just being quite negative and critical.

I think that that’s sort of the design. It’s not that the designers wanted to make people feel bad. I think they wanted to have a maximum kind of intense debate, right? Which I think that sort of creates a certain emotional feeling and load. I always just thought you could create a discussion experience that wasn’t quite so negative or toxic. I think in doing so, it would actually be more accessible to a lot of people. I think a lot of people just don’t want to use an app where they come away feeling bad all the time, right? I think that there’s a certain set of people who will either tolerate that because it’s their job to get that access to information or they’re just warriors in that way and want to be a part of that kind of intellectual combat. 

But I don’t think that that’s the ubiquitous thing, right? I think the ubiquitous thing is people want to get fresh information. I think there’s a place for text-based, right? Even when the world is moving toward richer and richer forms of sharing and consumption, text isn’t going away. It’s still going to be a big thing, but I think how people feel is really important.

So that’s been a big part of how we’ve tried to emphasize and develop Threads. And, you know, over time, if you want it to be ubiquitous, you obviously want to be welcome to everyone. But I think how you seed the networks and the culture that you create there, I think, ends up being pretty important for how they scale over time. 

Where with Facebook, we started with this real name culture, and it was grounded to your college email address. You know, it obviously hasn’t been grounded to your college email address for a very long time, but I think the kind of real authentic identity aspect of Facebook has continued and continues to be an important part of it.

So I think how we set the culture for Threads early on in terms of being a more positive, friendly place for discussion will hopefully be one of the defining elements for the next decade as we scale it out. We obviously have a lot of work to do, but I’d say it’s off to quite a good start. Obviously, there’s the huge spike, and then, you know, not everyone who tried it out originally is going to stick around immediately. But I mean, the monthly active’s and weekly’s, I don’t think we’re sharing stats on it yet. 

You can if you’d like.

No, I mean, I feel quite good about that. 

Because there’s been the reporting out there that engagement, which I think is natural with any spike like that, is not going to sustain . You guys set the original industry standard on engagement for these kinds of products, so I assume you’re guiding toward a similar kind of metric. 

Yeah, we just have this playbook for how we do this. Phase one is to build a thing that kind of sparks some joy and that people appreciate. Then, from there, you want to get to something that is retentive. So that way, people who have a good experience with a thing come back and want to keep using it.

And those two things are not always the same. There are a lot of things that people think are awesome but may not always come back to. I think some of what people are seeing now around ChatGPT is part of that. Like this level of AI is a miracle. It’s awesome, right? But that doesn’t mean that everyone is going to have a use case every week. 

First is to create the spark. Second is to create retention. Then, once you have retention, then you can start encouraging more people to join. But if people aren’t going to be retained by it, why would you ask people to go sign up for something?

Step one: spark; step two: retention; step three: growth and scaling the community. And then only at that point is step four, which is monetization. We take a while to go through all those. We’re really, in some sense, only getting started on the monetization of the messaging experiences like WhatsApp now with stuff like business messaging.

Took a while. 

But 2 billion people use the product every day, right? So we scaled it pretty far. But I think with our model, that sort of works. 

You are competing with Twitter, but you’re trying to do it differently. To me, as a Twitter addict for way too long and a very early Threads user — and I’ve been seeing similar feedback from others when Adam Mosseri has been asking for feedback on Threads — it still lacks that real-time feeling. 

That’s what I go to Twitter for: news. And I know you guys aren’t necessarily trying to emphasize news in this experience, which is a whole other topic, really, but how do you get that kind of Twitter-like “This is what’s going on right now” feeling? Because I don’t think Threads quite has that yet.

I think it’s a thing that we’ll work on improving, but I mean, hard news content isn’t the only fresh content. Even within news, there’s a whole spectrum between sort of hard, critical news and people understanding what’s going on with the sports that they follow or the celebrities that they follow. It’s not as cutting as a lot of the kind of hard news — and especially the political discussion. I think it’s just so polarized that I think it’s hard to come away from reading news about politics these days feeling good, right?

But that doesn’t go for everything, and part of this overall is just how you tune the algorithm to basically encourage either recency or quality but less recency. So, I’m not sure that we have that balance exactly right yet. It may be the case that in a product like Threads, where people may want to see more recent content, as opposed to something like an Instagram or Facebook, where it’s more visual and the balance might just be balancing toward maybe a little more quality, even if it’s 12 hours ago instead of two hours ago. So I think that this is the type of stuff that we need to tune and optimize, but yeah, I think I agree with that point.

This hasn’t happened yet with Threads, but you’re eventually going to hook it into ActivityPub, which is this decentralized social media protocol. It’s kind of complicated in layman’s terms, but essentially, people run their own servers. So, instead of having a centralized company run the whole network, people can run their own fiefdoms. It’s federated. So Threads will eventually hook into this . This is the first time you’ve done anything really meaningful in the decentralized social media space. 

Yeah, we’re building it from the ground up. I’ve always believed in this stuff.

Really? Because you run the largest centralized social media platform. 

But I mean, it didn’t exist when we got started, right? I’ve had our team at various times do the thought experiment of like, “Alright, what would it take to move all of Facebook onto some kind of decentralized protocol?” And it’s like, “That’s just not going to happen.” There’s so much functionality that is on Facebook that it’s way too complicated, and you can’t even support all the different things, and it would just take so long, and you’d not be innovating during that time. 

I think that there’s value in being on one of these protocols, but it’s not the only way to deliver value, so the opportunity cost of doing this massive transition is kind of this massive thing. But when you’re starting from scratch, you can just design it so it can work with that. And we want to do that with this because I thought that that was one of the interesting things that’s evolving around this kind of Twitter competitive space, and there’s a real ecosystem around that, and I think it’s interesting. 

What does that mean for a company like yours long term if people gravitate more toward these decentralized protocols over time? Where does a big centralized player fit into that picture?

Well, I guess my view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be. And I guess I’m just confident enough that we can build the best one of the services, that I actually think that we’ll benefit and we’ll be able to build better quality products by making sure that we can have access to all of the different content from wherever anyone is creating it.

And I get that not everyone is going to want to use everything that we build. I mean, that’s obviously the case when it’s like, “Okay, we have 3 billion people using Facebook,” but not everyone wants to use one product, and I think making it so that they can use an alternative but can still interact with people on the network will make it so that that product also is more valuable.

I think that can be pretty powerful, and you can increase the quality of the product by making it so that you can give people access to all the content, even if it wasn’t created on that network itself. So, I don’t know. I mean, it’s a bet.

There’s kind of this funny counterintuitive thing where I just don’t think that people like feeling locked into a system. So, in a way, I actually think people will feel better about using our products if they know that they have the choice to leave.

If we make that super easy to happen… And obviously, there’s a lot of competition, and we do “download your data” on all our products, and people can do that today. But the more that’s designed in from scratch, I think it really just gives creators, for example, the sense that, “Okay, I have…” 

Yeah, yeah. So, in a way, that actually makes people feel more confident investing in a system if they know that they have freedom over how they operate. Maybe for phase one of social networking, it was fine to have these systems that people felt a little more locked into, but I think for the mature state of the ecosystem, I don’t think that that’s going to be where it goes.

I’m pretty optimistic about this. And then if we can build Threads on this, then maybe over time, as the standards get more built out, it’s possible that we can spread that to more of the stuff that we’re doing. We’re certainly working on interop with messaging, and I think that’s been an important thing. The first step was kind of getting interop to work between our different messaging systems. 

Right, so they can talk to each other. 

Yeah, and then the first decision there was, “Okay, well, WhatsApp — we have this very strong commitment to encryption. So if we’re going to interop, then we’re either going to make the others encrypted, or we’re going to have to decrypt WhatsApp.” And it’s like, “Alright, we’re not going to decrypt WhatsApp, so we’re going to go down the path of encrypting everything else,” which we’re making good progress on. 

But that basically has just meant completely rewriting Messenger and Instagram direct from scratch. So you’re basically going from a model where all the messages are stored in the cloud to completely inverting the architecture where now all the messages are stored locally and just the way…

While the plane’s in the air.

Yeah, that’s been a kind of heroic effort by just like a hundred or more people over a multiyear period. And we’re basically getting to the point where it’s starting to roll out now. 

Now that we’re at the point where we can do encryption across those apps, we can also start to support more interop.

With other services that Meta doesn’t own?

Well, I mean, the plan was always to start with interop between our services, but then get to that. We’re starting to experiment with that, too.

I promised to stop bringing up Elon, but you and he were together with Sen. Chuck Schumer at the White House recently for this big AI summit , and a lot of it was closed doors.  

Along with a lot of other people.

Along with a lot of other people. You guys were sitting at opposite sides of the table. I thought that was an interesting choice. What was your takeaway from that and where the government is in the US on regulating AI? What do you think is going to happen?

Well, I didn’t really know what to expect going into that conversation, but it was quite substantive, and I think we covered a lot more ground than I expected. You asked about what it says about where the government is, and aside from Sen. Schumer, who basically moderated the discussion, it was really an opportunity for them to hear from the people in the tech industry but also folks in civil society.

I mean, you had people running unions. You had people from Hollywood and representing the creative industry and intellectual property. You had researchers and people focused on AI safety, and one of the things that I actually thought was the most interesting was the senators didn’t really speak that much. 

There’s sort of the meme that it’s like, “Okay, a lot of these politicians, they go to a place where they’ll get attention for themselves.” But, you know, this was a three-hour event, and I think there were like 40 senators sitting and listening and taking notes and not really participating in the discussion but just there to learn. 

And I thought that was super interesting, right? In a way that reflects pretty well on our system and the intellectual curiosity of the people who are ultimately going to be making those kinds of legislative decisions. 

So that was fascinating to see. I mean, I didn’t come away — you know, apart from seeing their heads nod when certain people made certain points — it wasn’t a time for us to really get their sense of where they are. I think it was more just they were hearing the discussion of the issues.

Have you seen some of the criticisms — and I don’t think it’s necessarily focused at you specifically — that the tech industry is performing regulatory capture right now with AI and is essentially trying to take the drawbridge up with them here? Are you worried about that at all?

I have seen that concern, and I’m somewhat worried about it myself. I mean, look, I think that there are real concerns here. So, I think a lot of these folks are truly earnest in their concerns. And I think that there is valuable stuff for the government to do, I think both in terms of protecting American citizens from harm and preserving I think what is a natural competitive advantage for the United States compared to other countries.

I think this is just gonna be a huge sector, and it’s going to be important for everything, not just in terms of the economy, but there’s probably defense components and things like that. And I think the US having a lead on that is important and I think having the government think through, “Okay, well, how do we want to leverage the fact that we have the leading work in the world happening here, and how do we want to kind of control that, and what restrictions do we want to put on that getting to other places?”

I think that that makes sense. There are a bunch of concerns there that I think are real. You know, one of the topics that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about is open source. Because, you know, we do a lot of open-source work at Meta. Obviously, not everything we do is open source. There’s a lot of closed systems, too. I’m not like a zealot on this, right? But I think I lean probably a little more pro-open source than most of the other big companies.

And we believe that it’s generally positive to open-source a lot of our infrastructure for a few reasons. One is that we don’t have a cloud business, right? So it’s not like we’re selling access to the infrastructure, so giving it away is fine. And then, when we do give it away, we generally benefit from innovation from the ecosystem, and when other people adopt the stuff, it increases volume and drives down prices. 

Like PyTorch, for example?

When I was talking about driving down prices, I was thinking about stuff like Open Compute, where we open-sourced our server designs, and now the factories that are making those kinds of servers can generate way more of them because other companies like Amazon and others are ordering the same designs, that drives down the price for everyone, which is good. PyTorch is great because it basically makes it so that it’s like the standard across the industry as people develop with this, which means that more libraries and modules are created for it, which just makes it better. And it makes it better for us to develop internally, too. 

So I think that all that stuff is true and works well for open source. And also, I think it’s pretty well established that open-source software is generally more secure and safer because it’s just more scrutinized, right? Every piece of software has bugs and issues, but the more people who can look at it, the more you’re going to basically identify what those issues are and have eyes on fixing them. And then also because there’s sort of a standard that’s deployed across the industry, those fixes get rolled out everywhere, which is a big advantage for safety and security. 

And when I think about AI safety, I think one of the big issues — if there’s like a single super intelligence and it’s closed, and someone figures out how to exploit it — is everyone kind of gets screwed at the same time. Whereas, in an open-source system, if people find issues and just like your Mac or whatever gets patched, people find the issues, and then it just gets rolled out across the industry.  

So I think that that’s generally positive, but there’s obviously this whole debate where when you open-source stuff, we can build in safeguards, but if you open-source something, you’re not fundamentally going to be able to prevent bad guys from taking that and running with it, too. So there is sort of this debate around, “Okay, well, what’s the balance? How capable do you want the models that are open source?”

And I think that there is a real debate there. I do sometimes get the sense that some of the folks whose business model is to basically sell access to the closed models that they’re developing, I do think that they have to be careful because they are also talking their book when they’re talking about dangers of open source, and I think that there are dynamics like that that happen that I hear either overtly or sometimes behind closed doors something will get back to me, that’s like, “Oh, this company was talking about why they’re kind of against open source.” And it’s like, yeah, well, their whole business depends on selling access to proprietary models, so I think you have to be careful about that.

The regulatory capture thing, I think you need to be careful about things like that because I do think one of the big benefits of open source is it also just decreases the cost of adoption for small companies and a lot of other folks. So I do think that’s going to be a big thing to watch out for over time. 

I think Llama and the Llama 2 release has been a big thing for startups because it is so free or just easy to use and access. I’m wondering, was there ever debate internally about “should we take the closed route?” You know, you’ve spent so much money on all this AI research. You have one of the best AI labs in the world, I think it’s safe to say. You have huge distribution — why not keep it all to yourself? You could have done that. 

You know, the biggest arguments in favor of keeping it closed were generally not proprietary advantage. 

Or competitive advantage?

No, it wasn’t competitive advantage. There was a fairly intense debate around this.

Did you have to be dissuaded? Did you know we have to have it open? 

My bias was that I thought it should be open, but I thought that there were novel arguments on the risks, and I wanted to make sure we heard them all out, and we did a very rigorous process. We’re training the next version of Llama now, and I think we’ll probably have the same set of debates around that and how we should release it. And again, I sort of, like, lean toward wanting to do it open source, but I think we need to do all the red teaming and understand the risks before making a call. 

But the two big arguments that people had against making Llama 2 open were one: it takes a lot of time to prepare something to be open. Our main business is basically building consumer products, right? And that’s what we’re launching at Connect. Llama 2 is not a consumer product. It’s the engine or infrastructure that powers a bunch of that stuff. But there was this argument — especially after we did this partial release of Llama 1 and there was like a lot of stir around that, then people had a bunch of feedback and were wondering when we would incorporate that feedback — which is like, “Okay, well, if we release Llama 2, is that going to distract us from our real job, which is building the best consumer products that we can?” So that was one debate. I think we got comfortable with that relatively quickly. And then the much bigger debate was around the risk and safety. 

It’s like, what is the framework for how you measure what harm can be done? How do you compare that to other things? So, for example, someone made this point, and this was actually at the Senate event. Someone made this point that’s like, “Okay, we took Llama 2, and our engineers in just several days were able to take away the safeguards and ask it a question — ‘Can you produce anthrax?’ — and it answered.” On its face, that sounds really bad, right? That’s obviously an issue that you can strip off the safeguards until you think about the fact that you can actually just Google how to make anthrax and it shows up on the first page of the results in five seconds, right? 

So there’s a question when you’re thinking through these things about what is the actual incremental risk that is created by having these different technologies. We’ve seen this in protecting social media as well. If you have, like, Russia or some country trying to create a network of bots or, you know, inauthentic behavior, it’s not that you’re ever going to stop them from doing it. It’s an economics problem. You want to make it expensive enough for them to do that that it is no longer their best strategy because it’s cheaper for them to go try to exploit someone else or something else, right? And I think the same is true here. So, for the risk on this, you want to make it so that it’s sufficiently expensive that it takes engineers several days to dismantle whatever safeguards we built in instead of just Googling it. 

You feel generally good directionally with the safety work on that? 

For Llama 2, I think that we did leading work on that. I think the white paper around Llama 2, where we basically outlined all the different metrics and all the different things that we did, and we did internal red teaming and external red teaming, and we’ve got a bunch of feedback on it. So, because we went into this knowing that nothing is going to be foolproof — some bad actor is going to be able to find some way to exploit it — we really knew that we needed to create a pretty high bar on that. So, yeah, I felt good about that for Llama 2, but it was a very rigorous process. 

And you guys have now announced the Meta AI agent , which is proprietary. I’m sure it’s using Llama technology, but it’s a closed model, and you’re not really disclosing a lot about the model and its weights and all that. But this is the new agent that people are going to be seeing in the apps. 

Yeah. So, at Connect, we announced a bunch of different things on this. Meta AI and the other AIs that we released are based on Llama 2. It’s not exactly the same thing that we open-sourced because we used that as the foundation, and then we built on top of that to build the consumer products. But there were a few different things that we announced. 

I feel like that part — the AI, to me — feels like the biggest deal in the near term. Because a lot of people are going to be seeing it, and it may be the first time, even with all the coverage of GPT, that a lot of people experience a chatbot like this. And it’s free, which is different. 

I’m very curious to see how the stuff gets used.  

I used it for a little bit, and it can pull in web results. So it’s got recency, which is nice. It wouldn’t give me advice on how to break up with my girlfriend . 

It wouldn’t? 

I don’t have a girlfriend; I’m married. But I was trying to see what it won’t and will answer. It seems relatively safe.

It seems like the type of thing that it should be fine giving you advice on. 

Well, I’m just telling you. But what do you imagine people using this for? Because it’s got that search engine component, but it can do a lot of things. I mean, is this a pure ChatGPT competitor in almost every way in your mind? How do you think about it?

I think that there’s a bunch of different spaces here that I think people are going to want to interact with AI around. Take a step back. I think that the vision for a bunch of folks in the industry, when I look at OpenAI or Google, is the sense that there’s going to be one big superintelligence, and they want to be it.

I just don’t think that’s the best future. I think the way that people tend to process the world is like, “We don’t have one person that we go to for everything. We don’t have one app that we go to for everything.” I don’t think that we want one AI. 

It’s overwhelming. I find this with the current chatbots. I feel like it can do so much that I’m not actually sure what to ask it. 

Yeah, so our view is that there’s actually going to be a lot of these that people talk to you for different things. One thought experiment that I did to sort of prove to myself that this would be the case is like, let’s say you’re a small business and you want to have an AI that can help you interface with customers to do sales and support. You want to be pretty confident that your AI isn’t going to be promoting your competitor’s products, right? So you want it to be yours. You want it to be aligned with you, so you’re going to want a separate agent than your competitor’s agent. 

So, then, you get to this point where there’s going to be 100 million AIs just helping businesses sell things. Then you get the creator version of that, where, like every creator is going to want an AI assistant, something that can help them build their community. People are going to really want to interact with it; there’s just way more demand to interact with creators. 

And there’s only one Kylie Jenner. 

There’s, I think, a huge need here. People want to interact with Kylie. Kylie wants to cultivate her community, but there are only so many hours in a day. Creating an AI that’s sort of an assistant for her, where it’ll be clear to people that they’re not interacting with the physical Kylie Jenner, it would be kind of an AI version. 

That will help the creators, and I think it’ll be fun for consumers. That one’s actually really hard because I think getting the creator one to work — we’re not actually launching that now, that’s, I think, more of a “next year” thing — because there’s so many… you can call it brand safety type concerns. 

If you’re a creator, you really want to make sure that these AIs reflect the personality of the creator and don’t talk about things that the creator doesn’t want to get into or don’t say things that are going to be problematic for the creator and their endorsement deals. 

The creator, I feel like, should have input in all of this. They should be able to say, “I don’t want this.” 

Oh yeah, but in some ways, the technology doesn’t even exist yet to make it that trained. I mean, this isn’t code in the deterministic sense, right? It’s like a model that you need to be able to train it to stay right in certain bounds. And I think a lot of that is still getting developed. 

So that’s more next year. 

Yeah. So there’s businesses. There’s creators. That stuff is fun, and the business stuff is, I think, more useful. And then I think that there’s a bunch of stuff that’s just interesting kind of consumer use cases.

So there’s more of the utility, which is what Meta AI is, like answer any question. You’ll be able to use it to help navigate your Quest 3 and the new Ray-Ban glasses that we’re shipping. We should get to that in a second. That’ll be pretty wild, having Meta AI that you can just talk to all day long on your glasses.

So, yeah, I think that’ll be pretty powerful. But then there are also going to be all these other new characters that are getting created, which is somewhat of an easier question to start with than having AIs that are kind of acting as a real person because there aren’t as many kinds of brand safety concerns around that, but they could still be pretty fun. So we’re experimenting with a bunch of different AIs for different interests that people have, whether it’s interested in different kinds of sports or fashion.

The one I tried was a travel agent type.

Yeah, travel. There’s some that are more on giving people advice. There’s like a life coach and, you know, like an aunt, right? And then there’s some that are more game-y. Like Snoop Dogg is playing the dungeon master, and there’s a few that are just these text-based adventure games and the ability to just drop that into a thread and, you know, play a text-based game is going to be super fun.

So, I think part of this is that we want to create a diversity of different experiences to see what resonates and what we want to go deeper on. This is the first step toward building this AI studio that we’re working on. That will make it so that anyone can build their own AIs, sort of just like you create your own UGC, your own content across social networks.

So, you should be able to create your own AI and publish it. I think that’s going to be really wild. 

I do agree it’s going to be wild. There’s a bit of uneasiness to it for me, just the idea that we as a society are going to be increasingly having relationships with AIs. I mean, there’s stories about Character.ai, which has a similar kind of library of personas you can interact with and people literally like falling in love with some of these chatbots . I mean, what do you think about that phenomenon? Is it just inevitable with where the tech is going? 

That’s not where we’re starting. So I think that there’s a lot of use cases that are just a lot more clear than that, right? In terms of, you know, someone who can help you make workouts, someone who can help you with cooking, more utility, figure out travel — or even the game-type stuff.

I think that a bunch of these things can help you in your interactions with people. And I think that’s more our natural space. One of the things that we can do that’s harder for others to do is the ability to make it so you can drop these into group chats. So we’re starting with Meta AI. You can just invoke it in any thread. Like I could be having a one-on-one thread with you, and I could just ask Meta AI something. I can do that in a group chat thread. So I think that that’s going to be really fun, right? It’s just having these kinds of fun personalities in these threads, I think, will create sort of an interesting dynamic. I think especially around image generation, and we haven’t talked about that as much. 

I used that. It was pretty impressive, and it was fast. 

Yeah. I mean, I think the team has made awesome progress. We’re at good photorealistic quality. 

For people who haven’t used it yet, you just type into the bot what you want the image to be, and it’ll just make it. 

Yeah. And the fact that it’s fast and free, I think, is going to be pretty game-changing. I mean, there are photorealistic image generators out there, but a lot of them take a minute.

They’re hard to use and to find — on Discord or whatever. 

Yeah. And you have to pay a subscription fee. So I think having it be free, fast, able to exist in group chat threads — I think people are just going to create a ton of images for fun. And I don’t know, I’m really curious to see how this gets used, but I think it’s going to be super fun.

I already just sit there with my kids, and the word you say to get it to make an image is “imagine,” and my daughter’s just like, “I just want to play ‘imagine.’” I’m just like, “Imagine this.” And we get an image, and “Oh, I actually want to change it. So imagine this ,” and edit the prompt. But because it’s just a five-second turnaround, you could do that so easily. You could do it over the internet with group chat.

I think there are all these things where you can use these tools to facilitate connections and just create entertainment, which is actually probably more what the technology is capable of today than even some of the more utility use cases because there is the factuality issue. I mean, with the hallucinations and all that, and you know, we’re trying to address that by doing partnerships with search engines that you mentioned. So you can type in a question and ask in real time, “Who won this fight this weekend?” and it’ll be able to go do a search and bring that in. But hallucination hasn’t been solved completely in any of these. 

So I think, to some degree, the thing that these language models have really been best at is — I mean, it’s kind of what the name “generative AI” suggests — being generative, right? Suggesting ideas. Coming up with things that could be interesting or funny. I wouldn’t necessarily yet want it to be my doctor and ask it for a diagnosis and have to rely that it’s not hallucinating. 

So I think having it fit into a consumer product where the primary goals are suggesting interesting content and entertainment is actually maybe a more natural fit for what the technology is capable of today than some of the initial use cases that people thought about it, like, “Oh, it’s going to be this kind of like all intelligent assistant, or it’s going to be my new search engine or something.”

It’s fine for those a bunch of the time, and I think it’ll get there over the next few years, but I think the consumer thing is actually quite a good fit today. 

It seems like a key differentiator for Meta in the whole model race is you have, probably second to maybe Google, the most user data to train on. And I know a lot of it’s private, and you wouldn’t ever train on private chats.

WhatsApp is encrypted, too, but public stuff — Reels, public Facebook posts — that seems pretty natural for this. Is that feeding into Meta AI right now? 

Like you said, we don’t train on private chats that people have with their friends.

But you’re sitting on this just massive hoard of data. It could be interesting in a model like this.

I actually think a lot of the stuff that we’ve done today is actually still pretty basic. So I think there’s a lot of upside, and I think we need to experiment with it to see what ends up being useful.

But one of the things that I think is interesting is these AI problems, they’re so tightly optimized that having the AI basically live in the environment that you’re trying to get it to get better at is pretty important. So, for example, you have things like ChatGPT — they’re just in an abstract chat interface. But getting an AI to actually live in a group chat, for example, it’s actually a completely different problem because now you have this question of, “Okay, when should the AI jump in?”

In order to get an AI to be good at being in a group chat, you need to have experience with AIs and group chats, which, even though Google or OpenAI or other folks may have a lot of experience with other things, that kind of product dynamic of having the actual experience that you’re trying to deliver the product in, I think that’s super important.

Similarly, one of the things that I’m pretty excited about: I think multimodality is a pretty important interaction, right? A lot of these things today are like, “Okay, you’re an assistant. I can chat with you in a box. You don’t change, right? It’s like you’re the same assistant every day,” and I think that’s not really how people tend to interact, right? In order to make things fresh and entertaining, even the apps that we use, they change, right? They get refreshed. They add new features. 

And I think that people will probably want the AIs that they interact with, I think it’ll be more exciting and interesting if they do, too. So part of what I’m interested in is this isn’t just chat, right? Chat will be where most of the interaction happens. But these AIs are going to have profiles on Instagram and Facebook, and they’ll be able to post content, and they’ll be able to interact with people and interact with each other, right?

There’s this whole interesting set of flywheels around how that interaction can happen and how they can sort of evolve over time. I think that’s going to be very compelling and interesting, and obviously, we’re kind of starting slowly on that. So we wanted to build it so that it kind of worked across the whole Meta universe of products, including having them be able to, in the near future, be embodied as avatars in the metaverse, right? 

So you go into VR and you have an avatar version of the AI, and you can talk to them there. I think that’s gonna be really compelling, right? It’s, at a minimum, creating much better NPCs and experiences when there isn’t another actual person who you want to play a game with. You can just have AIs that are much more realistic and compelling to interact with. 

But I think having this crossover where you have an assistant or you have someone who tells you jokes and cracks you up and entertains you, and then they can show up in some of your metaverse worlds and be able to be there as an avatar, but you can still interact with them in the same way — I think it’s pretty cool.

Do you think the advent of these AI personas that are way more intelligent will accelerate interest in the metaverse and in VR?

I think that all this stuff makes it more compelling. It’s probably an even bigger deal for smart glasses than for VR. 

You need something. You need a kind of visual or a voice control?  

When I was thinking about what would be the key features for smart glasses, I kind of thought that we were going to get holograms in the world, and that was one. That’s kind of like augmented reality. But then there was always some vague notion that you’d have an assistant that could do something.

I thought that things like Siri or Alexa were very limited. So I was just like, “Okay, well, over the time period of building AR glasses, hopefully the AI will advance.” And now it definitely has. So now I think we’re at this point where it may actually be the case that for smart glasses, the AI is compelling before the holograms and the displays are, which is where we got to with the new version of the Ray-Bans that we’re shipping this year , right? When we started working on the product, all this generative AI stuff hadn’t happened yet.

So we actually started working on the product just as an improvement over the first generation so that the photos are better, the audio is a lot better, the form factor is better. It’s a much more refined version of the initial product. And there’s some new features, like you can livestream now, which is pretty cool because you can livestream what you’re looking at. 

But it was only over the course of developing the product that we realized that, “Hey, we could actually put this whole generative AI assistant into it, and you could have these glasses that are kind of stylish Ray-Ban glasses, and you could be talking to AI all throughout the day about different questions you have.”

This isn’t in the first software release, but sometime early next year, we’re also going to have this multimodality. So you’re gonna be able to ask the AI, “Hey, what is it that I’m looking at? What type of plant is that? Where am I? How expensive is this thing?”

Because it has a camera built into the glasses, so you can look at something like, “Alright, you’re filming with some Canon camera. Where do I get one of those?” I think that’s going to be very interesting. 

Again, this is all really novel stuff. So I’m not pretending to know exactly what the key use cases are or how people are going to use that. But smart glasses are very powerful for AI because, unlike having it on your phone, glasses, as a form factor, can see what you see and hear what you hear from your perspective.

So if you want to build an AI assistant that really has access to all of the inputs that you have as a person, glasses are probably the way that you want to build that. It’s this whole new angle on smart glasses that I thought might materialize over a five- to 10-year period but, in this odd twist of the tech industry, I think actually is going to show up maybe before even super high-quality holograms do. 

Is overall interest in the Ray-Bans and the Quest line tacking with where you thought it would be at this point?

Let’s take each of those separately. Quest 1 was the first kind of standalone product. It did well, but all the content had to be developed for it. So it was really when we developed Quest 2, which was the next generation of it that already had all the content built, and it was sort of the refinement on it — that one blew up.

So Quest 2 was like a huge hit — tens of millions, right? That did very well and was the defining VR device so far. Then we shipped Quest Pro, which was making the leap to mixed reality, but it was $1,500. And what we’ve seen so far is that at least consumers are very cost-conscious. We expected to sell way fewer Quest Pros than Quest 2s, and that [bore] out. It’s always hard to predict exactly what it’ll be when you’re shipping a product at $1,500 for the first time, but it was kind of fine. Within expectations — it wasn’t like a grand slam, but it did fine. 

And now Quest 3 is the refinement on mixed reality , kind of like Quest 1 was. With Quest 3, we’re sort of at the point where we’ve gotten mixed reality, which is even higher quality than what was in Quest Pro, but it’s a third of the price, right? So it’s $500. So I’m really excited to see how that one will go. 

It seems like you all, based on my demos, still primarily think of it as a gaming device. Is that fair? That the main use cases for Quest 3 are going to be these kinds of “gaming meets social.” So you’ve got Roblox now. 

I think social is actually the first thing, which is interesting because Quest used to be primarily gaming. And now, if you look at what experiences are people spending the most time in, it’s actually just different social metaverse-type experiences, so things like Rec Room, VRChat, Horizon, Roblox . Even with Roblox just kind of starting to grow on the platform, social is already more time spent than gaming use cases. It’s different if you look at the economics because people pay more for games. Whereas social kind of has that whole adoption curve thing that I talked about before, where, first, you have to kind of build out the big community, and then you can enable commerce and kind of monetize it over time. 

This is sort of my whole theory for VR. People looked at it initially as a gaming device. I thought, “Hey, I think this is a new computing platform overall. Computing platforms tend to be good for three major things: gaming, social and communication, and productivity. And I’m pretty sure we can nail the social one. If we can find the right partners on productivity and if we can support the gaming ecosystem, then I think that we can help this become a big thing.”

Broadly, that’s on track. I thought it was going to be a long-term project, but I think the fact that social has now overtaken gaming as the thing that people are spending the most time on is an interesting software evolution in how they’re used. But like you’re saying: entertainment, social, gaming — still the primary things. Productivity, I think, still needs some time to develop. 

I tried the Quest 3. It’s definitely a meaningful step change in terms of graphics and performance and all the things you guys have put into it. It feels still like we’re a little ways away from this medium becoming truly mainstream. Becoming something that millions... 

When you say mainstream, what do you mean?

I know you’re already at [game] console-level sales, so you could say that’s mainstream, but I guess in terms of what you could think of as a general-purpose computing platform, so even like PC or something like that. 

Well, in what sense? I think there’s a few parts of this. I think for productivity, you probably want somewhat higher-resolution screens. That, I think, will come, and I think we’re waiting for the cost curve to basically — like, we could have super high-resolution screens today, just the device would be thousands and thousands of dollars, which is basically the tradeoff that Apple made with their Vision Pro.

Have you tried it yet? 

No, I haven’t, no. 

I did, and you’re right. They guided toward that one spec. You can tell.

Yeah, you have to imagine that over the next five-plus years, there will be displays that are that good, and they’ll come down in cost, and we’re riding that curve.

For today, when you’re building one of these products, you basically have the choice of if you have it at that expensive, then you will sell hundreds of thousands of units. But we’re trying to build something where we build up the community of people using it. We’re trying to thread the needle and have the best possible display that we can while having it cost $500, not $3,500. 

I reported on some comments you made to employees after Apple debuted the Vision Pro, and you didn’t seem super phased by it. It seemed like it didn’t bother you as much as it maybe could have. I have to imagine if they released a $700 headset, we’d be having a different conversation. But they’re shipping low volume, and they’re probably three to four years out from a general, lower-tier type release that’s at any meaningful scale. So is it because the market’s yours foreseeably then for a while?

Apple is obviously very good at this, so I don’t want to be dismissive. But because we’re relatively newer to building this, the thing that I wasn’t sure about is when Apple released a device, were they just going to have made some completely new insight or breakthrough that just made our effort…

Blew your R&D up? 

Yeah, like, “Oh, well, now we need to go start over.” I thought we were doing pretty good work, so I thought that was unlikely, but you don’t know for sure until they show up with their thing. And there was just nothing like that.

There are some things that they did that are clever. When we actually get to use it more, I’m sure that there are going to be other things that we’ll learn that are interesting. But mostly, they just chose a different part of the market to go in.

I think it makes sense for them. I think that they sell… it must be 15 to 20 million MacBooks a year. And from their perspective, if they can replace those MacBooks over time with things like Vision Pro, then that’s a pretty good business for them, right? It’ll be many billions of dollars of revenue, and I think they’re pretty happy selling 20 million or 15 million MacBooks a year.

But we play a different game. We’re not trying to sell devices at a big premium and make a ton of money on the devices. You know, going back to the curve that we were talking about before, we want to build something that’s great, get it to be so that people use it and want to use it like every week and every day, and then, over time, scale it to hundreds of millions or billions of people.

If you want to do that, then you have to innovate, not just on the quality of the device but also in making it affordable and accessible to people. So I do just think we’re playing somewhat different games, and that makes it so that over time, you know, they’ll build a high-quality device and in the zone that they’re focusing on, and it may just be that these are in fairly different spaces for a long time, but I’m not sure. We’ll see as it goes. 

From the developer perspective, does it help you to have developers building on… you could lean too much into the Android versus iOS analogy here, but yeah, where do you see that going? Does Meta really lean into the Android approach and you start licensing your software and technology to other OEMs?

I’d like to have this be a more open ecosystem over time. My theory on how these computing platforms evolve is there will be a closed integrated stack and a more open stack, and there have been in every generation of computing so far. 

The thing that’s actually not clear is which one will end up being the more successful, right? We’re kind of coming off of the mobile one now, where Apple has truly been the dominant company. Even though there are technically more Android phones, there’s way more economic activity, and the center of gravity for all this stuff is clearly on iPhones.

In a lot of the most important countries for defining this, I think iPhone has a majority and growing share, and I think it’s clearly just the dominant company in the space. But that wasn’t true in computers and PCs, so our approach here is to focus on making it as affordable as possible. We want to be the open ecosystem, and we want the open ecosystem to win.

So I think it is possible that this will be more like PCs than like mobile, where maybe Apple goes for a kind of high-end segment, and maybe we end up being the kind of the primary ecosystem and the one that ends up serving billions of people. That’s the outcome that we’re playing for. 

On the progress that you’re making with AR glasses, it’s my understanding that you’re going to have your first internal dev kit next year. I don’t know if you’re gonna show it off publicly or not, if that’s been decided, but is that progressing at the rate that you have hoped as well? It seems like Apple’s dealt with this, that everyone’s been dealing with kind of the technical problems with this.

I don’t think I have anything to announce on that today.

You said AR glasses are a kind of end-of-this-decade thing. And I guess what I’m trying to get at….

To be more of a mainstream consumer product, not like a v1. I don’t have anything new to announce today on this, and we have a bunch of versions of this that we’re building internally. 

We’re kind of coming at it from two angles at once. We’re starting with Ray-Ban, which is like if you take stylish glasses today, what’s the most technology that you can cram into that and make it a good product? And then we’re coming out from the other side, which is like, “Alright, we want to create our ideal product with full holograms. You walk into a room, and there’s like as many holograms there as there are physical objects. You’re going to interact with people as holograms, AIs as holograms, all this stuff.” And then how do we get that to basically fit into a glasses-like form factor at as affordable of a price as we can get to?

I’m really curious to see how the second generation of the Ray-Bans does. And the first one, I think the reception was pretty good. There were a bunch of reports about the retention being somewhat lower, and I think that there’s a bunch of stuff that we just need to polish, where it’s like the cameras are just so much better, the audio is so much better. We didn’t realize that a lot of people were gonna want to use it for listening to podcasts when they go on a run, right? That wasn’t what we designed it for, but it was a great use case. So it’s like, “Okay, great. Let’s make sure that that’s good in v2.”

The cycle for iterating on this — if you’re doing a Threads release or Instagram, the cycle is like a month. For hardware, it’s like 18 months, right? Or two years. But I think this is the next step, and we’re going to climb up that curve.

But the initial interest, I think, is there. This is an interesting base to build from, so I feel good about that. Going the other direction, the technology is hard, right? And we are able to get it to work. It’s currently very expensive, so if you want to reach a consumer population — 

— You’ve got to wait for the cost curve to come down?

So that’s the main limiting factor?

Well, I think there’s that. And we want to keep on improving it. But look, you learn by trying to assemble and integrate everything. You can’t just do a million R&D efforts in isolation and then hope that they come together. I think part of what lets you get to building the ultimate product is having a few tries practicing building the ultimate product. 

And that’s like, “Oh, well, we did that, but it wasn’t quite as good on this one dimension as we wanted, so let’s not ship that one. Let’s hold that one and then do the next one.” So that’s some of the process that we’ve had is we have multiple generations of how we’re going to build this. When I look at the overall budget for Reality Labs, it’s augmented reality, and the glasses, I think, are the most expensive part of what we’re doing.

That’s why I asked. Because I think people are wondering, “Where’s all this going?” 

At the end of the day, I’m quite optimistic about both augmented and virtual reality. I think AR glasses are going to be the thing that’s like mobile phones that you walk around the world wearing.

VR is going to be like your workstation or TV, which is when you’re like settling in for a session and you want a kind of higher fidelity, more compute, rich experience, then it’s going to be worth putting that on. But you’re not going to walk down the street wearing a VR headset. At least I hope not — that’s not the future that we’re working toward. 

But I do think that there’s somewhat of a bias — maybe this in the tech industry or maybe overall — where people think that the mobile phone one, the glasses one, is the only one of the two that will end up being valuable.

But there are a ton of TVs out there, right? And there are a ton of people who spend a lot of time in front of computers working. So I actually think the VR one will be quite important, too, but I think that there’s no question that the larger market over time should be smart glasses.

Now, you’re going to have both all the immersive quality of being able to interact with people and feel present no matter where you are in a normal form factor, and you’re also going to have the perfect form factor to deliver all these AI experiences over time because they’ll be able to see what you see and hear what you hear.

So I don’t know. This stuff is challenging. Making things small is also very hard. It’s this fundamentally kind of counterintuitive thing where I think humans get super impressed by building big things, like the pyramids. I think a lot of time, building small things, like cures for diseases at a cellular level or miniaturizing a supercomputer to fit into your glasses, are maybe even bigger feats than building some really physically large things, but it seems less impressive for some reason. It’s super fascinating stuff.

I feel like every time we talk, a lot has happened in a year. You seem really dialed in to managing the company. And I’m curious what motivates you these days. Because you’ve got a lot going on, and you’re getting into fighting, you’ve got three kids, you’ve got the philanthropy stuff — there’s a lot going on. And you seem more active in day-to-day stuff, at least externally, than ever. You’re kind of the last, I think, founder of your era still leading the company of this large. Do you think about that? Do you think about what motivates you still? Or is it just still clicking, and it’s more subconscious?

I’m not sure that that much of the stuff that you said is that new. I mean, the kids are seven years old, almost eight now, so that’s been for a while. The fighting thing is relatively new over the last few years, but I’ve always been very physical.

We go through different waves in terms of what the company needs to be doing, and I think that that calls for somewhat different styles of leadership. We went through a period where a lot of what we needed to do was tackle and navigate some important social issues, and I think that that required a somewhat different style. 

And then we went through a period where we had some quite big business challenges: handling in a recession and revenue not coming in the way that we thought and needing to do layoffs, and that required a somewhat different style. But now I think we’re squarely back in developing really innovative products, especially because of some of the innovations in AI. That, in some ways, plays exactly to my favorite style of running a company. But I don’t know. I think these things evolve over time.

It seems like you’re having more fun. 

Well, how can you not? I mean, this is what’s great about the tech industry. Every once in a while, you get something like these AI breakthroughs, and it just changes everything. That can be threatening if you’re behind it, but I just think that that’s like when stuff changes and when awesome stuff gets built, so that’s exciting.

The world has been so weird over the last few years, right? Especially, you know, going back to the covid pandemic and all that stuff. And it was an opportunity for a lot of people to just reassess what they found meaningful in their lives. And there’s obviously a lot of stuff that was tough about it, but you know, the silver lining is I got to spend a lot more time with my family, and we got to spend more time out in nature because I wasn’t coming into the office quite as much. 

It was definitely a period of reflection where I felt like since the time — I was basically 19 when I started the company. Every year, it was just, “Okay, we want to connect more people, right? Connecting people is good. That’s sort of what we’re here to do. Let’s make this bigger and bigger and connect more people and build more products that allow people to do that.” 

And we just sort of hit the scale where what I found sort of satisfaction in life from and what I think is like the right strategy — I think both for like me personally and for the company — is less to just focus on like, “Okay, we’re going to just connect more people,” and more like, “Let’s do some awesome things.”

It sounds very technical.

There are a lot of different analogies on this, but someone made this point to me that doing good things is different from doing awesome things. And social media, in a lot of ways, it’s good, right? It gives a lot of people a voice, and it lets them connect, and it’s warm. It’s taking a basic technology and bringing it to billions of people, but I think that there’s an inherent awesomeness in doing some technical feat for the first time.

For the next phase of what we do, I’m just a little more focused on that. I think we’ve done a lot of good things. I think we need to make sure that they stay good. I think that there’s a lot of work that needs to happen on making sure the balance of all that is right. But for the next wave of my life and for the company — but also outside of the company with what I’m doing at CZI and some of my personal projects — I define my life at this point more in terms of getting to work on awesome things with great people who I like working with. 

So I work on all this Reality Labs stuff with Boz and a team over there, and it’s just super exciting. And I get to work on all this AI stuff with Chris and Ahmed and the folks who are working on that, and it’s really exciting. And we get to work on some of the philanthropy work and helping to cure diseases with Priscilla and a lot of the best scientists in the world, and that’s really cool. And it’s like, then there’s like personal stuff, like we get to raise a family. That’s really neat — there’s no other person I’d rather do that with. I don’t know — to me, that’s just sort of where I am in life now. 

Sounds like a nice place to be. 

Ah, I mean, I’m enjoying it. 

Mark Zuckerberg, the optimist.

I mean, always somewhat optimistic. 

Thanks for the time, Mark.

Yeah, thank you. 

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Leadership Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg

When you look at eminent people including Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Malala Yousafzai, Taylor Carol, Nadir Vissanjy, Britney Spears, Amy Schumer, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Carli Lloyd, Yo Gotti, Eddie Redmayne, Danica Patrick, Serena Williams, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Justin Timberlake, and Usain Bolt; they are all millennials.

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook is an inspiration to millennials globally. He is many things to many people and is the young century’s first millennial CEO.  He is a philanthropist, digital trailblazer, and Time magazine named him Person of the Year, 2010.  Most millennials draw inspiration from this entrepreneurial icon to excel as entrepreneurs.

Mark Zuckerberg surprised the world with his innovative and creative internet technology and raised the hopes of billions of youth by dreaming and achieving big.  He busted the traditional leadership myth that leadership is exclusively for experienced and elderly.

It is remarked, “If Facebook was a country, it would be the third-largest in terms of population, after India and China, and Zuckerberg would be its undisputed leader sitting at the epicenter of it all.” What counts at the end of the day is passion.  It is the first and foremost thing that determines your success. Mark Zuckerberg was passionate about programming since childhood.  He was, in fact, a programming prodigy.  He was constantly working on the internet and computer-related activities since childhood. His father arranged tuitions to enable Mark to grow in his passionate domain of programming.

Mark Zuckerberg has become a symbol of hope, a role model, and inspiration for youth internationally.  He broke the traditional barriers and dreamt big and succeeded as the world’s youngest billionaire.   He proved to the world that leadership has nothing to do with age and experience.

Mark Zuckerberg unveiled rules for his success as follows: you get what you spend your time doing; take feedback; make mistakes; only hire people who work for; make a change in the world; learn from the people around you; build a good team; give the very best experience; care the most about it; social bonds are critical. Here are some leadership lessons to learn from him.

• Everything is possible in this world.  There are innumerable opportunities in this cut-throat competitive world. The only thing you must do is to look at the door that is opened rather than the one that is closed.
• Age is not a deterrent to achieving success and leadership.  People often think that leadership is synonymous with elderly and experienced people.  It is a myth.  The truth is that leadership lies with the people who take responsibility to move things forward.
• Don’t chase money but chase your passion to enable the money to run behind you.  Research shows that those who chased money and acquired could not enjoy their lives as they reached their saturation point quickly and found nothing beyond. However, those who followed their passions struggled initially but made good money and lived their lives fully.
• Follow the road that is less traveled. If you get into a conventional route that is cluttered with the competition, you get into the rat race and end up nowhere.  In contrast, if you follow an unconventional path that is unexplored and untested, you will come out with something new and leave a mark behind for others to follow you.
• Focus on your goals firmly.  Goals keep you aligned and focused.  It helps you manage your time.  It helps you remove negative thoughts and fill your mind with positive thoughts.  It holds your dreams high. Above all, it enhances your longevity.
• Spot your talents and push forward.  Don’t run around skills and abilities by ignoring your hidden talents. Mark Zuckerberg pursued his talents in programming that helped him.  Consequently, he has built skills and abilities around his talents paving the way for his meteoric rise.
• Know the pulse of the people and move on.  Mark Zuckerberg recognized the need for connecting with people when he was at Harvard College and worked on it. He moved on with changes and modifications and ultimately co-founded Facebook.  Hence, identifying the pulse of people and their needs is imperative to stay ahead of others.
• Have a dream and work on it.  Don’t get distracted from your dreams and by criticism.  Stick to it and you will soon see yourself on the top of the world. Mark Zuckerberg had a dream and accomplished it.
• Emphasize work-life balance. Mark Zuckerberg is an ideal example of a work-life balance. After the birth of his first child, he took two months of paternity leave to spend time with his family.
• Make a difference in the lives of others as it gives you greater satisfaction apart from living beyond your lifetime. Mark Zuckerberg has made a difference in the lives of others through his technology and philanthropic activities.

Facebook is the fastest-growing phenomenon in internet history. Nobody could predict and imagine that it would hit globally in a huge way.  It will become the face of mankind in the technological world soon.  Microsoft survived and succeeded despite competition and Apple survived competition through innovation.   Similarly, Facebook will survive only through innovation.  Mark Zuckerberg would like to make his company as of the most powerful companies in the world. He is bullish and optimistic about Facebook.  He says, “If you look five years out, every industry is going to be rethought in a social way.”  To conclude, Facebook must stay away from controversies and innovate constantly to stay relevant in this rapidly growing technological world by shedding its image of being an internet hangout and widening its base with more features and applications.

Have you read? Highest Paying STEM Jobs . Highest Paying Healthcare Jobs . Highest Paying Healthcare Support Jobs . Highest Paying Primary And Secondary Education Jobs .

This report/news/ranking/statistics has been prepared only for general guidance on matters of interest and does not constitute professional advice. You should not act upon the information contained in this publication without obtaining specific professional advice. No representation or warranty (express or implied) is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this publication, and, to the extent permitted by law, CEOWORLD magazine does not accept or assume any liability, responsibility or duty of care for any consequences of you or anyone else acting, or refraining to act, in reliance on the information contained in this publication or for any decision based on it.

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Apple’s C.E.O. Is Making Very Different Choices From Mark Zuckerberg

Tim cook views privacy as ‘one of the top issues of the 21st century.’ other tech leaders don’t seem to agree..

(SINGING) When you walk in the room, do you have sway?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m Kara Swisher, and you’re listening to “Sway.” My guest today is Apple CEO Tim Cook. He’s been at Apple for 23 years and at the helm of the company for almost 10, having inherited the reins from the late Steve Jobs. When Cook got the top job, Apple’s market cap was close to $350 billion. Today, it’s worth over $2 trillion. It churns out billions of devices that are hugely popular worldwide, but the company is also now in the crosshairs of antitrust investigators due to its massive size and power. Epic Games is suing Apple, for example, alleging the company is a monopoly. And other developers are also complaining to regulators. Meanwhile, some users of the so-called free speech network Parler have also taken issue with Apple for removing Parler from its App Store. It was a move made by Apple and by Google and Amazon after the Capitol attacks. They maintain that Parler failed to moderate dangerous content related to the attempted insurrection on January 6. Cook has also become a hero to some, doubling down in an impassioned speech and a major privacy conference recently, calling out the tech industry, especially social media companies, over misuse of consumer data.

If a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform. We should not look away from the bigger picture. At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement.

Tim Cook, welcome to “Sway.” That was quite a speech. I was surprised by how strongly you put it. You were talking about social media companies there and those that use data. You took Parler off. How did you think about that decision?

Well, in some ways, it was a straightforward decision, because they were not adhering to the guidelines of the App Store. You can’t be inciting violence or allow people to incite violence. You can’t allow hate speech and so forth. And they had moved from moderating to not being able to moderate. But we gave them a chance to cure that. And they were unable to do that or didn’t do that. And so we had to pull them off. Now, having said that, Kara, I hope that they come back on. Because we work hard to get people on the store, not to keep people off the store. And so, I’m hoping that they put in the moderation that’s required to be on the store and come back, because I think having more social networks out there is better than having less.

The day of the attack, I was actually interviewing the C.E.O of Parler. It was quite an astonishing interview. Did you listen to what he said? He said, I don’t have responsibility. I don’t take any responsibility.

And obviously, that doesn’t adhere to the App Store terms and conditions.

Yeah, you had been working with them previously on these issues, too.

We believe that at a point in time, they were compliant.

And then they were not.

Yeah, and lots of tech companies acted at the same time, whether it was Amazon, Google, you, and others. It was sort of like a house of cards sort of fell in on them. Should it have been done before?

It happened as soon as we became aware of it. And I’m not sure it would have taken the Capitol event for that to occur. We would have taken it off when we became aware. After giving some time to cure, we would have taken it off. And again, I can’t stress enough, I hope they come back.

Yeah, I want to talk about the hearings on Capitol Hill last month. You weren’t there, but the CEOs of three tech companies were — Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Sundar Pichai from Google and Alphabet. Congressman Mike Doyle asked all three tech executives to answer yes or no to the same question, which was a little reductive. I would have asked it slightly differently. But he wanted to know whether their companies bore any responsibility for spreading misinformation and planning the attack on the Capitol. They didn’t answer. They sort of tried to walk around it. Jack Dorsey kind of answered — said yes, but, essentially. How would you have answered for those companies or for Apple, or technology in general?

Well, I can only speak for Apple. And from the very start, we’ve always believed in curation. And so we review every app that goes on the store. That doesn’t mean that we’re perfect at doing it. We’re not. But we care deeply about what we’re offering our users. And when we have a news product like Apple News, we have human editors that are selecting the key stories. And so, they’re avoiding all of the misinformation that is out there. The reality is that the web in some areas has become a dark place. And without curation, you wind up with this firehose of things that I would not want to put into an amplifier.

Which is what tech is, in a large way. If you have a platform, you amplify things.

Do you consider Apple an amplifier?

Well, I think in areas like the selection of stories on Apple News, we have human editors do that. Even though the App Store isn’t a push, so we’re not pushing things in your feed like a social media company would be, a lot of people are coming to the App Store. And so we want that to be a safe and trusted place to be.

What is the broader culpability of Big Tech in the context of things like the attack? Because you did actually address it in your speech on privacy. A lot of people give some culpability to social media sites. And Apple does not have one. Ping never sort of took off. I remember Ping was the social network Apple had that —

Yeah, I do remember. I’m glad you reminded me.

Yeah, I remember Steve. He says, what do you think of Ping? It sucks. And he’s like, yes, yeah, it does. It really does. But do you think social media sites were culpable in the attack?

I think that the amplification of social media is something that I deeply worry about. And the targeting tools, the same tools that are used to target in advertising can be used to target for misinformation purposes or extremist purposes. And so I deeply worry about that. The people I fault the most for the Capitol attack are the people that obviously were in the attack itself, that breached the Capitol. But I think it’s incumbent on all of us to take a step back and ask, what were the other contributing factors? Because we don’t want to repeat it. This was one of the darkest days in our history. And it played out in front of all of us. I felt like it was more of a movie or something, that it was something that was not real, that it couldn’t be happening in the United States of America. And so I’m hopeful that that deep inspection occurs.

So one of the things this calls for amending Section 230, which is, of course, the part of the Communications Decency Act that protects platforms from getting sued because of content of the user’s post. Do you think liability is important?

I’m not big on suing as a lever. I think 230, it was written at a time prior to lots of things that have come into existence. And they weren’t envisioned. And so, I think it’s time to revisit 230. But I don’t have an answer of what the perfect way to revise 230 would be.

So let’s talk about the solutions. I want to get into privacy, which Apple has been pushing rather hard as well. How do you look at data and privacy bills that are being contemplated?

Generally speaking, I think privacy is one of the top issues of the 21st century. And I think we’re in a crisis.

Years ago, I thought companies would regulate themselves and sort of get better. I no longer believe that. And I’m not generally somebody that is keen on regulation, but I think that regulation is required.

What made you not believe it? What tipped you over?

Because I saw companies continually going outside of what I thought were reasonable rails.

Mm-hmm. One of the things you said in that speech, if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, we lose so much more than data. We lose freedom to be human. Talk about what you meant by that.

If you think about a surveillance world, a world where you know somebody is always watching everything you’re doing — and in the case of a phone or a computer, it’s also what you’re thinking, because you’re typing in searches and so on and so forth. And so I think in that kind of world, you begin to do less. You begin to think less. Your freedom of expression begins to narrow. And the walls move in on you. And I start thinking about that at its natural endpoint. And I don’t want to be a part of that society.

And why is it important for Apple to speak up on this? You sell the phones that allow these apps to do those things. You’ve used it as a brand attribute in advertising, very strong advertising standing up for privacy. Why are you speaking out so strongly about it?

It’s not about being a brand attribute, to be frank. For us, privacy is a basic human right. And it’s a right that other rights are built off of. It’s that kind of core. It’s bedrock. And it’s not something that I just decided a few years ago. As I remember, Steve commented on this with you over a decade ago. He said something like, privacy means people know what they’re signing up for in plain English, repeatedly. The individual should own their data. And they should own the ability to say who gets it and what of their data they get and what they use it for. And frankly, that’s not the situation of today.

Are you surprised by the amount of data thievery, essentially, that goes on?

I’m appalled by it. And so we’ve got things coming out like a privacy nutrition label. Privacy policies have become these multi-page things that people just blindly say, I agree, so that they can go to the next screen and move on. A privacy nutrition label, much like a nutrition label on food, gives you at a glance some key information. We’ll improve that over time. And then the one, Kara, that’s probably gotten the most attention is called ATT.

Yes, we’re going to get into that.

App Tracking Transparency, and what it tries to get at is companies that are taking advantage of tracking you across apps of other companies, and therefore putting together an entire profile of what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, surveilling you across the web 24/7.

Right, using devices you make as the vehicle to do so.

They are using all technology for these, whether —

Yeah, right. I’m just saying in your case. So let’s make it easy for people to understand. When exactly is the new update coming out?

It’s just a few weeks now.

All right, and it’s called ATT, which is App Tracking Transparency.

That’s right.

Obviously, companies like Facebook and many others make a lot of money from data collected from those trackers. How will the consumers see it? What is going to happen?

They’ll see a simple pop-up that basically prompts them to answer the question of, are they OK with being tracked or not? If they are, things move on. If they’re not, then the tracking is turned off for that individual with respect to that specific app.

Right, and will it tell them what’s tracking to let them make a decision? Because just saying, do you want to be tracked, most people are like, stopped? No, no thank you.

The developer can put essentially other information in there. Maybe they say that it’s for better ads or better targeted ads or whatever. All we want to do is supply a tool so that the person that should make the decision can make it.

You’re guiding them there, though. You are guiding them to doing this. Why did you decide to do this now?

Kara, every year, we add privacy features. If you look back in time, we’ve added some every year. It is not aimed at a company. It’s aimed at a principle. And the principle is that the individual should be in control over whether they’re tracked or not, who has their data. It’s that simple. And if you were designing such a system from scratch today, of course you would do this. Of course, it should be your decision of what happens to your data, not mine or somebody else. And people that argue against that choice is essentially saying that they didn’t have informed consent before. And I think that’s a powerful point in and of itself.

Right, but Facebook, the company’s privacy stance, Facebook said, was meant to benefit your own bottom line. And you’re in this fight with Facebook. And what is your response to Facebook’s response, which is quite vehement, calling you, essentially, an existential crisis to their business?

All we’re doing, Kara, is giving the user the choice whether to be tracked or not. And I think it’s hard to argue against that. I’ve been shocked that there’s been a pushback on this to —

— this degree. To this degree. Because I mean, how do you argue against that? It’s sort of like —

They have a lot of them. You’re hurting small businesses. That it’s part of your bottom line.

But we know these things are flimsy arguments.

So you say you’re surprised by this pushback. I’m surprised you’re surprised, I guess. You’re aiming at the heart of those businesses.

First of all, I don’t really agree with that — with that assertion. I think that you can do digital advertising and make money from digital advertising without tracking people when they don’t know they’re being tracked. And I think time will prove that out. I’ve heard this about other things we’ve done in the past that it’s almost existential and it wasn’t. I don’t buy that.

What will be the result of the impact on Facebook’s business, do you think? I’m going to use Facebook because they’re the biggest, and they’re the ones that collect the most data. But Google also does, and many others do.

Yeah, Kara, I’m not focused on Facebook, so I don’t know. I’m just saying —

But they called you their “competitor,” so you don’t see it this way? You don’t view them as a competitor to Apple?

Oh, I think that we compete in some things. But no, if I may ask who our biggest competitor are, they would not be listed. We’re not in the social networking business.

Mm-hmm. All right, let me ask you one more Facebook — I’m sorry to bug you about this. But we spoke three years ago on stage in Chicago. It was after Cambridge Analytica news broke when I asked you to imagine yourself in Zuckerberg’s shoes in his situation. I want you to hear this clip. And here’s what you said.

We’ve always felt really responsible for —

Mark Zuckerberg — what would you do?

What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation.

OK. [LAUGHTER]

People seemed to like that answer. Do you feel that way now?

You know I can only talk about the choices that Apple has made.

Mm-hmm. And this is a good choice, this transparency tracker.

I feel very emphatically that it is. That data minimization, getting as little as you need, making sure you need what you’re getting, challenging yourself to get less and less and less and less, and then security is the underpinning for privacy, right? And encryption and there’s a whole bunch of things we could talk about there by itself.

Well, let me ask that. Several years ago, you were in a fight over encryption. This is after the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack. The FBI asked Apple to build a backdoor to unlock the attacker’s phone. You opposed the order, citing the danger to privacy.

Yes, we cited the danger to hundreds of millions of customers because you can’t build a singular backdoor. The backdoor that they were asking for was in the operating system and would affect everybody that owns an iPhone.

And then the Justice Department ended up unlocking the iPhone without Apple’s help.

Where do you stand now on that?

I think it was the right fight. I think encryption is still under fire today. There’s still people that believe that the government should have a — should either have a key or have access to a key or have a door or access to a door. And our point of view hasn’t changed on that. It’s that once you have a back door, you have a back door for everybody. There’s not a way in technology today to have a back door just for the good guys.

All right, you’re being sued right now by Epic Games, which makes the wildly popular game “Fortnite.” Back in August, Epic tried to circumvent Apple’s App Store. Basically, they wanted to avoid Apple taking a 30% cut of the in-app purchase. So they introduced their own direct payment system. You kicked “Fortnite” off the store for breaking the rules. You may not be able to talk specifically, but what was the principle at stake here?

It’s about living up to the rules and the guidelines of the App Store. And they had done that for years and then had decided evidently that they didn’t want to follow the rules anymore, and had passed something through app review and then after it had been through app review, changed it on the server side. So it was sort of a deceitful move. And so we’re going into court. We’re coming to tell our story. We’re going to talk about the privacy and security aspects of the store. And we’re confident in our case.

This trial is set for I think May 3, coming up.

Yeah, it’s coming in a month.

So when you look at this case, one of the things is, it could be bad rules. This is what they’re trying to argue, I think, on Epic’s side, whether these rules where you take a certain cut and then, for example, Apple takes only 15% cut of Amazon’s App Store revenue for Prime Video, for example. Is there a reckoning for you all to think about changing these rules more significantly?

Well, the App Store is not cast in concrete, you know? And so we’ve changed over time. And in fact, if you look at the commissions, Kara, and I would sort of reframe a bit from what you said, because the vast majority of people pay nothing. Because there’s not an interchange of a digital good, right? And so, like, 85% of people pay zero commission. And then with our recent move with small developers, developers earning less than a million dollars a year pay 15%. Well, it turns out that that’s the vast majority of developers. And then, we also have rules that say that if you have a subscription model in the second year and later years, you only pay 15% of those. And so we’ve only reduced the price over time. It’s only gone in one direction. It’s gone down. More apps were exempted. But those rules are applied equally to everyone. So you’ve mentioned Amazon getting 15%. That’s true for any kind of video streaming service that meets the guidelines of that program.

So it depends on what they’re doing — what they’re necessary —

It depends on what they’re doing. Right.

Like Netflix and others, right. What’s wrong with Epic or any developer going their own way or allowing a direct payment system, instead of having to go through the App Store? Why should you have the control?

Well, I think somebody has to. I think somebody has to curate, right? Because users aren’t going to come there and buy things if they don’t have trust and confidence in the store. And we think our users want that.

Why can’t there be more stores, other stores run by others?

Because if you had side loading, you would break the privacy and security model.

On the phone itself, and the phone itself wouldn’t protect the user necessarily.

Well, you’d be opening up a huge vector on another store.

Do you find this to be your most vulnerable part of your business, these issues with antitrust investigators looking into it?

Apple has helped build a economy that’s over a half a trillion dollars a year, half a trillion, and takes a very small sliver of that for the innovation that it unleashed and the expense of running the store. I think it’s hard to argue that the App Store is not an economic miracle. I mean, you just look at it. There’s been over a million people in the U.S now have their livelihoods associated with the App Store. And they are not only selling in the United States, but they’re selling abroad. And this is one of the fastest growing job segments.

. But yet, you feel you have to have complete control over this economic miracle, or you can’t envision not having control of it?

I think curation is important as a part of the App Store. In any given week, 100,000 applications come into the app review. 40,000 of them are rejected. Most of them are rejected because they don’t work or don’t work like they say that they work. You can imagine if curation went away, what would occur to the App Store in a very short amount of time.

We’ll be back in a minute. If you like this interview and want to hear others, follow us on your favorite podcast app. You’ll be able to catch up on “Sway” episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with former Parler CEO John Matze. And you’ll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Tim Cook after the break.

You’ve acquired a lot of companies since 2015, but not big ones. Apple has still maintained it’s not in the big acquisition game. I think the last big acquisition was Beats Music and Beats Electronics in 2014 for $3 billion, which was a long time ago. Talk a little about where you think innovation is going for Apple itself.

Obviously, I have a rule against talking about things in the future. But I’m very excited about AR. I’m very excited about AI.

What is your big interest in augmented reality? I remember we had lunch once, and again, you talked about football and augmented reality. That was all you talked about. So what was that? And I’m more interested in, as I told you, in augmented reality. What is the interest in it? Because Apple is holding its next Worldwide Developers Conference in June with the tagline “Glow and Behold.” I don’t know what that means. It’s rumored that Apple is expected to announce the first major new device since 2015, a mixed-reality headset. Can you talk about AR and this mixed-reality headset?

Well, I can’t talk about anything that may or may not be in the pipeline. But in terms of AR, the promise of AR is that you and I are having a great conversation right now. Arguably, it could even be better if we were able to augment our discussion with charts or other things to appear. And your audience would also benefit from this, too, I think. And so when I think about that in different fields, whether it’s health, whether it’s education, whether it’s gaming, whether it’s retail, I’m already seeing AR take off in some of these areas with use of the phone. And I think the promise is even greater in the future.

So it’s a critically important part of Apple’s future.

What about content? You’re in content. Why do you think you need to be in there competing against a Netflix? It seems like it’s a comma for you, like hardly any investment.

Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. We’re making serious investments in Apple TV Plus. I assume you’re talking about video content.

Yeah, mm-hmm.

For the same reason that we’re in products, we’re about making the best, not the most. And so in the TV Plus area, we’re about originals only on Apple. And so I don’t know if you’re watching, what you’re watching at all, but —

“The Morning Show,” just on yours. That’s all.

You’re watching “The Morning Show.” I hope you love it. “Ted Lasso” — I don’t know if you’ve watched Ted Lasso.

But there was no better show during COVID. I’m getting notes from a lot of different people that love it.

Right, how do you compete, though, against a Netflix? And you’ve got all these streamers, while HBO Max is making all this content. You have money. That’s what you have the most of, I think, compared to all of them.

Well, hopefully, we have good ideas. But Kara, I don’t see it as a zero sum game. I don’t see that if a given user buys Netflix, that they can’t also buy Apple.

And you think content is critical as an area of focus for Apple.

Yes, and we’re putting all of ourselves into it. It is not a hobby. It is not a dip your toe in. Because it’s an original focus, we don’t instantly have a catalog with 500 things in it. We’re going to build over time. We’ve gotten over 300 nominations now for awards and have won 80.

Yeah, you don’t strike me as a Hollywood guy, Tim. I don’t know.

I’m not a Hollywood guy.

Yeah, I don’t see you, like, swanning around Hollywood.

I’m not a Hollywood guy. But Kara, I love great content.

Mm-hmm. Last question on innovation, self-driving cars. One of the companies you acquired is Drive AI, a self-driving startup. Apple is testing autonomous vehicles. It was, reportedly. Last year, Elon Musk said he offered to sell Tesla to Apple for 1/10 its value. And he said you wouldn’t even take a meeting with him.

You know, I’ve never spoken to Elon, although I have great admiration and respect for the company he’s built. I think Tesla has done an unbelievable job of not only establishing the lead, but keeping the lead for such a long period of time in the EV space. So I have great appreciation for them. In terms of the work that we’re doing there, obviously, I’m going to be a little coy on that. The autonomy itself is a core technology, in my view. If you sort of step back, the car, in a lot of ways, is a robot. An autonomous car is a robot. And so there’s lots of things you can do with autonomy. And we’ll see what Apple does. We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day. I’m not saying that one will not.

Would it be in the form of a car or the technology within a car?

Yeah, I’m not going to answer that question.

I think it has to be a car. You can’t just do the tech — you’re not going to let — you’re not Google.

We love to integrate hardware, software, and services, and find the intersection points of those because we think that’s where the magic occurs. And so that’s what we love to do. And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that.

I’m going to go with car for that, if you don’t mind. I’m going to just jump to car. I wish you would make a car. I actually have been looking at electric cars and autonomous cars. Anyway, one of the things I want to finish up is you yourself in your sort of evolution, but politically, too, you were talking about voting rights, about the issues in Georgia. You did engage with Trump a lot. I didn’t call you “Tim Apple” once. Do you miss that, by the way?

Being called “Tim Apple“?

I changed my Twitter handle to “Tim Apple” for a while. So I leaned into it.

You leaned into it. And you just didn’t correct him. You just thought, why not? Why not just let him do it? How do you look at working with the Biden administration versus the Trump administration? Because you’ve become more political, I think.

I don’t feel political. I feel that we focus on policies. And we believe strongly in an engagement. So whoever is in the White House, we’re going to seek to engage. And we’re going to seek to find areas of commonality where we can help the administration. And there will be areas that I’m sure that we are on different sides of an issue as well. But our focus is not on the politics of it. It’s on the policy. And so that’s what we did during President Trump’s administration. That’s what we’ll do during President Biden’s administration.

Talk about voting rights and what you said.

Yeah, well, voting rights, I think voting rights are fundamental to democracy. You know, I think about my old friend, John Lewis. And sort of what John did to advance voting rights and the hard-fought wins there, we can’t let those go in reverse. And I think, just from a stepping back from it, I think we’re probably all having the wrong conversation on voting rights. We should be talking about using technology. How can we make it so simple that our voting participation gets to 100? Or it gets really close to 100. Maybe we get in the 90s or something. It’s pretty arcane.

Certainly, but when you introduce technology into voting when it’s already fraught with accusations of fraud, it’s sort of a really troublesome stew, politically speaking.

I’m not sure. It may answer some of the issues. It may be something that is so different than the current —

So voting on phones? Is that what you’re talking about?

You know, I would dream of that, because I think that’s where we live. We do our banking on phones. We have our health data on phones. We have more information on a phone about us than is in our houses. And so why not?

Well, it’s been a little politicized at this point. I mean, it’s interesting you’re saying policy versus politics, but you’re in the middle of politics right now. Are there any negatives to moving into the political space from your perspective as a modern CEO?

It’s not something I want to do. The way that I look at it is, we want to advance some of our policies. We want to advance immigration. We want to advance on working on climate change. We want to advance job creation. We want to advance retraining because we see the need to retrain over a lifetime. And we want to find the administrations or representatives that believe in those things and work with them on those. It’s not really working against somebody. It’s working for those causes.

Is there a cost to a CEO inserting themselves in?

Inserting themselves in policy? Oh, every time I say something, somebody will reach out to me and not be very happy.

Right, or not — or be very happy.

You decided to come out in 2014 in a Bloomberg piece. I can’t believe you didn’t come to Kara Swisher, but that’s OK. That’s all right. I’m forgiving you. And you’re the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Do you feel the need to be an even louder voice now or a more prominent leader in this area? You just teamed up with non-profit Encircle to donate a million dollars. You’re serving as honorary co-chair.

The way that I looked at this was I wanted to speak my truth because I saw kids struggling with who they were and maybe being disowned by their families, maybe being bullied — a set of horribles, if you will. And I felt that coming out and speaking my truth would help show them that there was a light at the end of the tunnel; that they could rise and do things incredible in life, that they were not capped in some kind of way because they were part of the LGBTQ community. And I feel like — well, I know because I’ve gotten so many different notes and people reaching out to me over time — that I accomplished that for a number of people. And I feel really good about that. I don’t feel like that’s all I need to do. I think to whom much is given, much is required. And so I’m going to continue. Encircle is a great example. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that organization.

I am. They build homes.

But they build homes. They have kids that come to these homes. They have programs built around. It’s a safe place to be. I think that program is scalable. And so we want to help that in any way that we can. And I’m going to speak out on laws and regulations that pop up that are discriminatory to the community.

What about Arkansas? Arkansas has passed a bill allowing doctors to refuse to treat LGBTQ patients. How do you look at issues like this?

This is, everybody should be treated with dignity and respect. If you go in to a doctor, they should treat you. I’m surprised we’re even having to say that. It’s disappointing.

Yeah. Are you worried?

I’m worried that there seems to be more of a move afoot in a number of states in this front, uh, very focused on transgender and then some focused on the broader community. And I think this encroachment needs to stop.

All right, so 10 years. Are you going to be at Apple 10 more years?

10 more years, I probably not. But I can tell you that I feel great right now. And the date’s not in sight. But 10 more years is a long time and probably not 10 more years.

What would you do if you weren’t running Apple?

I don’t have a clue, because I love this company so much, that it’s hard to imagine my life without it.

And so I don’t think I will know that until after I’m not here. Because I think I’ll run so fast that I’ll never really think about it until I’m not running anymore. Does that make any sense?

Maybe just go on vacation.

Something like that. All right, Tim, thank you so much.

Kara, it was great talking with you. Good seeing you.

All right, bye.

Bye-bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]

“Sway” is a production of “New York Times” Opinion. It’s produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Heba Elorbany, Matt Kwong, and Daphne Chen; edited by Nayeema Raza and Paula Szuchman; with original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Erick Gomez, and fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Liriel Higa, and Jamie Collazo. If you’re in a podcast app already, you know how to get your podcasts, so follow this one. If you’re listening on The Times website and want to get each new episode of “Sway” delivered to you via mixed-reality glasses, download any podcast app, then search for “Sway” and follow the show. We release every Monday and Thursday.

• June 30, 2022   •   47:35 Behind the Scenes of ‘Sway’ With Kara Swisher
• June 27, 2022   •   36:42 ‘Venture Capitalists Are Going to Turn Into Vulture Capitalists,’ and Other Predictions From Andrew Ross Sorkin
• June 23, 2022   •   38:07 Would You Upload Your Consciousness to the Cloud?
• June 20, 2022   •   31:18 ‘The Senate Needs a Soul’
• June 16, 2022   •   40:41 As Bitcoin Busts, What’s the Future of Web3? And What Even Is Web3?
• June 13, 2022   •   40:05 The Planet Is Burning. Are Billionaires the Answer?
• June 9, 2022   •   42:25 David Axelrod, Sarah Longwell and Preet Bharara on What to Look For in the Jan. 6 Hearings
• June 2, 2022   •   35:24 ‘The Elon That We’re Seeing Today Is Not the Same One We Saw a Couple Years Ago’
• May 30, 2022   •   29:56 David Ellison on ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ Working With Tom Cruise and Hiring John Lasseter
• May 26, 2022   •   30:53 When It Comes to Gun Control, Will ‘Baby Steps’ Fix Anything?
• May 23, 2022   •   35:22 The C.E.O. of Condé Nast: ‘This Is No Longer a Magazine Company’
• May 18, 2022   •   38:24 The Digital Tools That Aided the Buffalo Gunman — and What to Do About Them

Produced by ‘Sway’

It’s a dismal world when two tech giants are embroiled in a fight over your privacy. Yet here we are as updates from Apple that give users more power over their data and make third-party tracking more transparent have sent Facebook into a fury. The social media giant took out a full-page ad last year claiming it was “standing up to Apple.” Or perhaps Facebook was standing up for its bottom line, as tracking is a critical component of the company’s targeted ad business.

[You can listen to this episode of “Sway” on Apple , Spotify , Stitcher , Amazon Music , Google or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, tells Kara Swisher that he’s “not focused on Facebook” and that privacy evolution is “not aimed at a company, it’s aimed at a principle.”

In this episode of “Sway,” Ms. Swisher presses Mr. Cook on the motivations behind Apple’s privacy push, the power the company has over app developers, and potential future Apple innovations, from augmented-reality headsets to autonomous cars. They also discuss the decision to remove Parler from the App Store after the Capitol attacks — and why Mr. Cook hopes that the right-leaning social media company will “come back.”

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

“Sway” is hosted by Kara Swisher, produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Heba Elorbany, Matt Kwong and Daphne Chen, and edited by Nayeema Raza and Paula Szuchman; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Erick Gomez. Special thanks to Jamie Collazo, Shannon Busta and Liriel Higa.

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• Mind-reading technology has arrived

An AI-powered “brain decoder” can now read your thoughts with surprising accuracy.

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For a few years now, I’ve been writing articles on neurotechnology with downright Orwellian headlines. Headlines that warn “ Facebook is building tech to read your mind ” and “ Brain-reading tech is coming .”

Well, the technology is no longer just “coming.” It’s here.

With the help of AI, scientists from the University of Texas at Austin have developed a technique that can translate people’s brain activity — like the unspoken thoughts swirling through our minds — into actual speech, according to a study published in Nature .

In the past, researchers have shown that they can decode unspoken language by implanting electrodes in the brain and then using an algorithm that reads the brain’s activity and translates it into text on a computer screen. But that approach is very invasive, requiring surgery. It appealed only to a subset of patients, like those with paralysis, for whom the benefits were worth the costs. So researchers also developed techniques that didn’t involve surgical implants. They were good enough to decode basic brain states, like fatigue, or very short phrases — but not much more.

Now we’ve got a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) that can decode continuous language from the brain, so somebody else can read the general gist of what we’re thinking even if we haven’t uttered a single word.

How is that possible?

It comes down to the marriage of two technologies: fMRI scans, which measure blood flow to different areas of the brain, and large AI language models, similar to the now-infamous ChatGPT.

In the University of Texas study, three participants listened to 16 hours of storytelling podcasts like The Moth while scientists used an fMRI machine to track the change in blood flow in their brains. That data allowed the scientists, using an AI model, to associate a phrase with how each person’s brain looks when it hears that specific phrase.

Because the number of possible word sequences is so vast, and many of them would be gibberish, the scientists also used a language model — specifically, GPT-1 — to narrow down possible sequences to well-formed English and predict which words are likeliest to come next in a sequence.

The result is a decoder that gets the gist right, even though it doesn’t nail every single word. For example, participants were asked to imagine telling a story while in the fMRI machine. Later, they repeated it aloud so the scientists could see how well the decoded story matched up with the original.

When the participant thought, “Look for a message from my wife saying that she had changed her mind and that she was coming back,” the decoder translated: “To see her for some reason I thought she would come to me and say she misses me.”

Here’s another example. When the participant thought, “Coming down a hill at me on a skateboard and he was going really fast and he stopped just in time,” the decoder translated: “He couldn’t get to me fast enough he drove straight up into my lane and tried to ram me.”

It’s not a word-for-word translation, but much of the general meaning is preserved. This represents a breakthrough that goes well beyond what previous brain-reading tech could do — and one that raises serious ethical questions.

The staggering ethical implications of brain-computer interfaces

It might be hard to believe that this is real, not something out of a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel. But this kind of tech is already changing people’s lives. Over the past dozen years, a number of paralyzed patients have received brain implants that allow them to move a computer cursor or control robotic arms with their thoughts.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta are working on BCIs that could pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words in real time, which could one day allow you to control your phone or computer with just your thoughts.

Non-invasive, even portable BCIs that can read thoughts are still years away from commercial availability — after all, you can’t lug around an fMRI machine, which can cost as much as $3 million . But the study’s decoding approach could eventually be adapted for portable systems like functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which measures the same activity as fMRI, although with a lower resolution.

Is that a good thing? As with many cutting-edge innovations, this one stands to raise serious ethical quandaries.

Let’s start with the obvious. Our brains are the final privacy frontier. They’re the seat of our personal identity and our most intimate thoughts. If those precious three pounds of goo in our craniums aren’t ours to control, what is?

Imagine a scenario where companies have access to people’s brain data. They could use that data to market products to us in ways our brains find practically irresistible. Since our purchasing decisions are largely driven by unconscious impressions, advertisers can’t get very helpful intel from consumer surveys or focus groups. They can get much better intel by going directly to the source: the consumer’s brain. Already, advertisers in the nascent field of “neuromarketing” are attempting to do just that, by studying how people’s brains react as they watch commercials. If advertisers get brain data on a massive scale, you might find yourself with a powerful urge to buy certain products without being sure why.

Or imagine a scenario where governments use BCIs for surveillance, or police use them for interrogations. The principle against self-incrimination — enshrined in the US Constitution — could become meaningless in a world where the authorities are empowered to eavesdrop on your mental state without your consent. It’s a scenario reminiscent of the sci-fi movie Minority Report , in which a special police unit called the PreCrime Division identifies and arrests murderers before they commit their crimes.

Some neuroethicists argue that the potential for misuse of these technologies is so great that we need revamped human rights laws to protect us before they’re rolled out.

“This research shows how rapidly generative AI is enabling even our thoughts to be read,” Nita Farahany, author of The Battle for Your Brain , told me. “Before neurotechnology is used at scale in society, we need to protect humanity with a right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences.”

As for the study’s authors, they’re optimistic — for now. “Our privacy analysis suggests that subject cooperation is currently required both to train and to apply the decoder,” they write.

Crucially, the process only worked with cooperative participants who had participated willingly in training the decoder. And those participants could throw off the decoder if they later wanted to; when they put up resistance by naming animals or counting, the results were unusable. For people on whose brain activity the decoder had not been trained, the results were gibberish.

“However, future developments might enable decoders to bypass these requirements,” the authors warn. “Moreover, even if decoder predictions are inaccurate without subject cooperation, they could be intentionally misinterpreted for malicious purposes.”

This is exactly the sort of future that worries Farahany . “We are literally at the moment before, where we could make choices to preserve our cognitive liberty — our rights to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences — or allow this technology to develop without safeguards,” she told me. “This paper makes clear that the moment is a very short one. We have a last chance to get this right for humanity.”

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More From Forbes

Yes, even putin just warned you that telegram is dangerous.

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When even Vladimir Putin warns your messaging platform is dangerous, you should probably take it seriously...

Surprise warning issued for all Telegram users

Telegram is not a different flavored WhatsApp—as I have warned before. The Russian-born, Dubai-based platform straddles an awkward line between friendly messenger and easy-to-use dark web portal. And while you can ignore warnings from security experts, when Vladimir Putin calls out the platform as a threat, you should probably take notice.

This surprise twist comes courtesy of an interview Russia’s Life conducted with Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, in the aftermath of the March 22 attack on a concert at Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk. ISIS has taken credit for the attack, which killed more than 130 people. It is actually little surprise that Telegram—according to the captured suspects, featured heavily in their recruitment. As the Counter Extremism Project says, “terrorist and extremist groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others use the encrypted application Telegram for purposes that may include recruiting new members, fundraising, inciting violence, and even coordinating terrorist activity.”

“This unique and phenomenal from a technological point of view resource, which has grown, in fact, before the eyes of our generation, is increasingly becoming a tool in the hands of terrorists - it is used for terrorist purposes," Peskov told Life, directing his comments at Telegram’s founder. “Of course, we would expect more attention from Pavel Durov.”

This Popular Google App Will Stop Working In 3 Days How To Migrate Your Data

Ufc fight night results fighter suffers rare self inflicted ko loss, daniel kahneman author of thinking fast and slow dies at 90.

Telegram’s reported security risks are multi-faceted. Organizing terrorism and criminality, as is the case here. Actually fueling some of that criminality by providing a shop window for weapons, malware and other threats. Radicalizing users by providing a platform for extremist. And, more mundanely but critically, claiming a level of security and privacy that experts say is not warranted , misleading its vast 750-million-plus user base.

According to Reuters , Telegram’s founder responded on his platform—albeit there’s nothing now on his channel: “Durov said measures had been taken immediately to stop what he said had been a flurry of unknown users posting messages appearing to call for new acts of violence. ‘Tens of thousands of attempts to send such messages were intercepted and thousands of users taking part in this flashmob came up against a permanent block on their Telegram accounts.’”

Ironically, Durov’s comments hint at that last security risk—the lack of end-to-end encryption on Telegram, by default for 1:1 chats and in any form for group chats. It’s this that prompted Kaspersky to warn users that “by default, Telegram chats do not use end-to-end encryption, and nor does the messenger inform users about the secure chat option. Who could have thought that a user who just installed a messenger precisely because it was advertised as secure wanted to keep correspondence private? Even the notorious WhatsApp—part of Mark Zuckerberg’s data-hungry empire—uses end-to-end encryption by default. The user doesn’t need to do anything at all, there are no special checkboxes or anything: messages are protected from all outsiders (including the service owners) right out of the box.”

According to Life , Putin via Peskov said there were no current plans to ban Telegram in Russia, but it’s fair warning that the messaging platform is on notice. How the rest of the world deals with an app whose popularity is surging—and has been since WhatsApp’s infamous change of terms debacle back in 2021—remains to be seen.

But as the Financial Times says, with the platform “also act[ing] as a magnet for the lawless, for disinformation pushers, conspiracy theorists and extremists fleeing the tighter restrictions on rivals such as Meta’s Facebook and Google’s YouTube, experts warn it is increasingly weaponized for propaganda by the very governments whose citizens may rely on it for information,” and so one might reasonably expect some form of censure at some point.

So, should you quit the app? Maybe. You should certainly proceed with caution. And when the platform suggests high-risk updates, such as asking for permission to use your phone number to sell commercial SMS services in return for free premium membership, you should absolutely say no . My advice would be to stick to WhatsApp. While Telegram might seem more edgy, it’s definitely in that category of things your mom warned you to avoid when you were a kid.

I have approached Telegram for any comments on this latest turn of events.

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