Secrets of the Algorithm with Instagram's Adam Mosseri

Speaker 1 The following podcast is a DR Media production.

Speaker 2 good guys.

Speaker 1 Monster Morons, welcome back to the Good Guys Podcast. We are sitting here with the president of Instagram, Adam Mossari.

Speaker 4 Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for doing this.

Speaker 1 Wow, look at this, Ben.

Speaker 4 Can you believe it? It's fantastic.

Speaker 3 It's fantastic. And we've been chatting with Adam for the last 10 minutes.
And let me tell you, he is much funnier than I expected. So this episode is going to be an absolute hoot.
We are seven boys.

Speaker 3 We have seven boys between the three of us.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 3 Parents over here. good guys adam's another good guy and just happens to run a platform that is incredibly important to the livelihoods of all of us so yeah thank you very much adam yeah

Speaker 4 if you just allow the

Speaker 4 and if you can just allow the algorithm to reach a few more people yeah yeah i would be very well i'm sure we'll talk about the algorithm What is the algorithm kept like, you know how the Coca-Cola recipe is in like a cave in Atlanta?

Speaker 4 Like it's kept

Speaker 1 like there's only one person who has the recipe and it's like maybe one of the Koch family. Where's the algorithm held?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 to start, we talk a lot about, honestly, I used to try to reframe questions like that because there isn't one algorithm.

Speaker 4 There's lots of things we do to try to understand how interested you are in certain topics, what certain content's about, match you with your interests, et cetera.

Speaker 4 But at this point, I think everyone just, what they mean when they say the algorithm is, is the sum of all of those things. And I've stopped trying to fight that framing.

Speaker 4 I just don't want people to feel like the algorithm is some entity that has its own agency that I we hide behind. Like we are responsible for the decisions we make and what we build.

Speaker 4 And that affects what people see. So I want to make sure we own that.
But to answer your question, for ranking and relevance and algorithms, it is code on servers in data centers all over the world.

Speaker 4 Lots of copies of the same code.

Speaker 1 And is it changing all the time?

Speaker 4 Every day. People often think that something major has changed in the algorithm, and they use that to explain why their reach might have gone way up or way down.

Speaker 4 But the truth is, we almost never make major changes to it. We constantly make small changes to try to improve it over time.

Speaker 1 Oh, that you are. I feel so seen.
That's me on the group chat with a bunch of other influencers. Like when I'm having a real shit week, I go, they changed it, bro.

Speaker 4 Just throw me under the bus.

Speaker 3 I'm shadow banned.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 that's the shadow banning yeah they're not highlighting funny right now bro yeah

Speaker 4 funny does well funny is one of the best verticals i all the data i've seen suggests funny it's funny is still good but how it is how long have you been at instagram adam i joined instagram in the spring of 18.

Speaker 4 i was hired to run what's called their product management team by Kevin and Mikey, the founders.

Speaker 4 They had already been at the company, which was then called Facebook, now called Meta, for about six and a half years at at the time, maybe six years. But I was at Facebook for 10 years before that.

Speaker 1 So 2008, right? Is that when you started?

Speaker 4 July 08, I started. I was a designer.
We were just a website.

Speaker 4 The iPhone, I think, had just come up, but we didn't have an iPhone app. And,

Speaker 4 you know, it was fun. It wasn't, it wasn't a bunch of kids in a college dorm.
It was, we were, you know, we had a couple hundred people in an HR department. There were some adults around, but sure.

Speaker 4 We were pretty young and trying to figure it out on the fly. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.

Speaker 1 Are you represented in social network?

Speaker 4 Is it

Speaker 4 a good question too? I don't think so. No.

Speaker 1 But you tell, you tell people. You go see that extra back there on the laptop.

Speaker 4 That's me. That's me.
The kid with the juphro in the back. Yeah.

Speaker 4 That's cool. I went to see it.
I remember I went to see. We all went to see it together, actually.

Speaker 3 But we got Facebook stock, right? Did we get Facebook stock? We did.

Speaker 4 Did I? Did you? Yes.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 in 08.

Speaker 4 Innovation, yes, yeah. The way the compensation is on all tech companies is stock and salary.

Speaker 4 And that's all we do that because we think it's good for the employees to have an incentive for the business to do well, not just for them to do well as individuals.

Speaker 1 We tried to offer Olivia stock and good guys.

Speaker 4 She said no.

Speaker 4 She's like, pay me that cash. She doesn't quite see the runway.

Speaker 3 Olivia, we'll offer you 25% of the company or two grand in cash.

Speaker 4 Shit, two grand. She's like, I'll take a certificate to McDonald's.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Juice bar,

Speaker 3 Equinox or something.

Speaker 1 But you were saying, so you as a company went to go watch social network?

Speaker 4 We did. We all went together.
Wow. What was that like?

Speaker 1 With Mark?

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It was surreal.
It was interesting because

Speaker 4 you can't help but get distracted by what's accurate and what's inaccurate.

Speaker 4 It's almost, you know, if you've read a book and then watched the movie and then you kind of get distracted by where it deviates and where it lines up, it was almost like that. Right.

Speaker 1 But like at that time, you came on after like Eduardo had left the the company and Sean Parker was gone, the whole thing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Sean was not at the company.

Speaker 4 But you know, we there were some interactions back then, I think, with him. But no, it was just after that phase.
Wow. Yeah.
What a time.

Speaker 1 How exciting.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, it was, it was very exciting and humbling at the same time.

Speaker 1 When did you get on Instagram, Ben?

Speaker 3 Probably like 2013.

Speaker 3 I was going to ask this. So I posted memes forever.
That was like my original Boy with No Job and Girl with No Job were memes.

Speaker 3 And then we pivoted over time as the platform evolved, and memes sort of went away, and video started to take hold.

Speaker 3 But it's funny, even to this day, if I were to post a meme, it would reach four times the amount of people than a video. Is there a way to let I know the algorithm, you can't like talk to it?

Speaker 3 Is there a way to train the algorithm to let them know that you no longer post that type of content, even a decade later?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 No,

Speaker 4 but it's not always the case that memes do better than videos. It depends on the

Speaker 4 person and the content. I actually do think we should try to get to a place where you can actually talk to the algorithm.
And I can talk about that more if you'd like. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But most of how the ranking system work is not actually thinking much about you and your history. It's mostly oriented around consumers.

Speaker 4 It's like, okay, here's a piece of content who might be interested in it.

Speaker 4 Let's go and find out as many people as possible who we think could be interested in it, whether or not they follow you or not.

Speaker 4 There are things that are producer-side-oriented, but for the most part, it's nothing happens when you post right away.

Speaker 4 What happens is that all the people who then log in and follow you open up Instagram later, and then we go and look at that post and everything else that was posted, and then try to figure out what they might be interested in.

Speaker 4 It's not like a piece of mail that gets sent. It's almost like a DVD added to a DVD collection.
And then the next person who comes into the store, it's an option.

Speaker 1 Is there like a a checkpoint type thing in the sense of so I post something right? Do certain things, do you need to hit certain milestones quickly for then it for it to be widely broadcast?

Speaker 4 That's a great question. So there are two sides to how ranking works for organic content.
So not ads. We're just talking about when you post on Instagram as a creator or as just an average folk.

Speaker 4 There's one side, which is for the accounts that follow you.

Speaker 4 So everyone who's followed you, they we're trying to find as many of them as possible who are interested in your post and just show them that content.

Speaker 4 So when they open up Instagram, we look at that post and all the other posts they could see and we rank them based on relevance.

Speaker 4 Half of the people who follow you might not even use Instagram anymore or not be Instagram that day. Maybe another half of those don't scroll far enough.

Speaker 4 So you're never going to reach most of your followers, even though we all would love to reach all of them. But that's that, there's that system

Speaker 4 where there's no sort of gate or minimum thing or threshold that you sort of have to cross necessarily. Then there's the unconnected side.

Speaker 4 So we try to go out and find people who don't follow you, who might love and be interested in your content. And the way that works is kind of like an audition system.

Speaker 4 So we try to make sure every piece of content gets, that's public, that's trying to reach a lot of people, gets a minimum number of views.

Speaker 4 And then if it, so we have, we set aside a little bit of what we call impressions or views to try things out like that.

Speaker 4 And then if it does really well, then we get it, we broadcast that piece of content to more unconnected accounts. And if it does well again, it gets, it graduates again.

Speaker 4 So it's almost like a competition where it can

Speaker 4 keep, if it does better than everything else, continue to get promoted and promoted and promoted, which is how you can see content from very small accounts go very viral sometimes.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, it's interesting, right, Ben? Because like I find in general, I have like the metrics for my channel, like milestones or I'll see.

Speaker 1 If something's at about 60,000 views in the first 10 minutes, I go, this one's going to go. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's not, I go, you know what, babe? Door dash. Yeah.
You know, like,

Speaker 4 you know, let's treat ourselves. No caveat.
Nice. Yeah, it's going to be, we could pay.

Speaker 1 And we won't do pickup.

Speaker 4 We'll do delivery. Yeah.
You know, we'll do the charges.

Speaker 1 But then if I see it like teetering at 15, you know, 20,000, I go, this one, I just know it's not going to make it.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So that's, that's often true that early on you can get a sense for how something's going to do.
But what matters is not really a number of views. It's the interaction rates.

Speaker 4 So of all the people who saw it, how many people liked it? Right. Of all the people who saw it, how many people sent it to a friend.

Speaker 4 And what you're getting a sense for in those first, you know, in that first hour is what that rate is. Because you're like, all right, 60,000 views.
It's doing better than the average thing I did.

Speaker 4 But what's really happening behind the scenes is maybe your average post has like a five percent like rate and this one had a six percent like rate or one percent comment rate so one out of 100 people commented on it this one had 1.1 that's actually a big delta it doesn't sound like it but it is yeah and you're seeing that start to get picked up in the ranking system it's the best but don't overreact i'm finding

Speaker 4 here one small thing the comments we're trying to make sure they're as civil as possible people on the internet are not always as civil as we would like i strongly ask anybody who struggles with mean comments sometimes to just give it a minute before you get in there because the people who post comments the quickest are the craziest.

Speaker 4 And if you just wait an hour or two, normal people tend to sort of drown out the wild. And so just give it a minute.
Don't don't get on there in their comments in those first hour.

Speaker 4 I feel like that's not the best.

Speaker 1 And will some of those, will the filter catch some of those within the first hour?

Speaker 4 Yeah. But there's things that are not allowed, which will get caught.
But then there's things that are allowed, but they're just mean. Oh, yeah.
We're aware. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And then normal and nice comments will just push those mean comments way down over time. But there's a correlation between how quickly you comment and how tough you can be as a commenter.

Speaker 4 It turns out.

Speaker 1 I have a gift for finding the mean.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Don't look for it.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah.
What are your comments like?

Speaker 4 So there's a couple. There's a lot of mad about reach.
Okay. Give me back chrono feed.
It's my birthday. All I want for my birthday is a blue check mark.

Speaker 4 People being upset about having some piece of content taken down or feel like they're shadow banned or someone they care about has. But look, that's part of the job.

Speaker 4 You're gonna, if you're responsible for a platform that so many people use and rely on when things don't go their way, even if it's a small percentage of people, it's a lot of, it's still a lot of people.

Speaker 4 Billion, two billion? Three.

Speaker 4 It's only seven billion people in the world. Three billion people a month.

Speaker 3 using this. It's unbelievable.
We just crossed that. It's unbelievable.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't know how to do it.

Speaker 3 It's unbelievable how big Instagram is. It's so crazy.

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Speaker 5 If you've ever been laying awake at three in the morning, replaying something you said literally months ago, this show is for you.

Speaker 5 I'm Carla, the host of Don't Think, a podcast that will not fix you, but it will make you laugh, make you feel seen, and hopefully give you a break from the chaos of your own brain.

Speaker 5 New episodes every Thursday. This is Don't Think, a break for your brain.

Speaker 3 The translate tool that's now, I think it was, is it new?

Speaker 4 I use it a lot. I'm so excited about that.

Speaker 3 And I like it a lot. And I have noticed, so all of my, like three years ago, I pivoted hard into cooking.
All of my content now is recipe reels.

Speaker 3 They're doing better than really any content I've ever posted over the last decade, aside from memes. So I've clearly found my niche.

Speaker 3 But I think that the translate piece is making the reach even higher. It is.
Obviously, that would be, it would become relevant. to people outside of the U.S.
So it makes sense.

Speaker 3 But would you recommend always turning that on? Like, are you guys prioritizing that? Or it just naturally will feed into more circles because people are understanding what you're saying.

Speaker 4 Exactly. It's the latter.
So it will help with reach more and more over time because we're still getting, we're still new to this.

Speaker 4 So for those of you who don't know, when you post a reel on Instagram, you can have it translated automatically into the four languages that we support are English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hindi, which, by the way, cover up.

Speaker 4 cover the majority of users because India and Brazil are massive, massive countries for us. And then obviously Spanish is spoken in a lot of countries.

Speaker 3 I told you, Josh, India.

Speaker 4 India, Josh. It's by far our biggest country.
I know.

Speaker 1 You should look at my DMs.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's almost primarily Delhi.

Speaker 4 But you might not know how to speak the language. Right.

Speaker 4 And so if I can explain how Instagram works and it can just show up as me in my voice with looking like my lips are saying words in Hindi, all of a sudden I can reach an audience in India who speaks Hindi and doesn't speak English.

Speaker 4 Which, by the way, is only about half of India, because there's maybe 26 official Indic languages at this point. There's many, many more that are actually spoken on the ground.

Speaker 4 So, the whole idea here is to help creatives reach audiences and find fans across language barriers.

Speaker 1 What's the Instagram perks looking like? Is there an Instagram PJ?

Speaker 4 What are we talking about?

Speaker 1 Like, you got to be places.

Speaker 4 You're not fine spirit.

Speaker 4 Come on.

Speaker 4 I'm a United guy. United.

Speaker 4 When the PJs broke. San Francisco.
We don't have, we don't have one. Well, Mark, Mark, I'm sure, has a plane, but the rest of us do not, which is good, I think.

Speaker 4 No, the perks are, I mean, look, it's a wonderful place to work. They take really good care of us.

Speaker 4 I laughed when you first said perks because I think of the team, they love swag. They love like, is swag, swag, swag, swag.
And I'm like, why? Why do you want another shirt with like a logo on it?

Speaker 4 Like, they just can't, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter who you are.
People love a free t-shirt and they love a free mug.

Speaker 1 One of your great employees who I've known for 20 years, Justin Anthony. Yes.
One of the greats.

Speaker 4 He's a sweetheart.

Speaker 1 He and I started our careers together. He was like a talent executed Nickelodeon when I was 14.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he's always championed me. And when he moved over to Instagram, it just felt natural.

Speaker 1 And so he had like a summit for creators years ago and brought us up to the headquarters and was like, come over, come see.

Speaker 1 I mean, was the Facebook headquarters created by the people who did Disney or downtown Disney or is that a myth?

Speaker 4 No, no, it wasn't. It was the, did you go to the campus that was right on the, like it's by this sort of like salt flats by the, you know, kind of a water body, body of water?

Speaker 1 Maybe. I mean, it had everything.

Speaker 4 What year was it?

Speaker 1 This was probably 2018, 2019. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 So it would have been classic campus. Yeah.
It was like an old sun headquarters. It was like an old Silicon Valley company headquarters.

Speaker 1 It was sick.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like ice cream shop, unbelievable, like five different places to eat food. But the best part was he took me and the other influencers.
And let's be honest, we love free stuff.

Speaker 1 He said, come to the, come to the company store.

Speaker 4 I got a patagonia.

Speaker 1 I said, I can have this.

Speaker 4 He goes, whatever you want, Josh.

Speaker 1 I said, this is Patagonia. This is high-end material.
And it's got a nice, and it had the Facebook patch right at the bottom. So tasteful.
It was very tasteful.

Speaker 4 It wasn't just like on your, on your chest. Just

Speaker 4 a book. Too much.
Yeah. That's good.
That's good. It's, it's not quite as Disneyland as it used to be.

Speaker 4 I think once we, you know, through the pandemic and then 2022 and the market contraction, we've started to try to be much more judicious in our expenses. So it's not quite the

Speaker 4 wildness that it was, which I think is also good, but it's still a wonderful place to work. I'm not trying to complain at all.

Speaker 3 I was just going to say, speaking of working for Instagram, I think it's the perfect time. I worked in media for a decade before doing what I'm doing.

Speaker 3 And I actually DM'd, I looked back, I DM'd the Instagram account. Oh, no.
I'm going to read it to you. I DM'd the Instagram account in 2019.

Speaker 4 And I wrote,

Speaker 3 hey, long shot, but I saw a job at Instagram that I was incredibly intrigued by. I was wondering if you could possibly connect me with someone in recruiting to talk about it.

Speaker 4 Did you just go on red? They just ghosted you?

Speaker 3 No one ever read it.

Speaker 4 No one ever read it.

Speaker 3 And let me tell you,

Speaker 3 this was very talented Ben, formerly at Vayner Media,

Speaker 3 very, very excited to work at Instagram. And thank God it didn't happen because my life turned out great.
But I wanted to work at Instagram so badly. Does Instagram check its DMs?

Speaker 4 I check my DMs, but I don't check yet on Instagram. I'm pretty sure someone does, but there's a lot.
There's almost 700 million people follow that account. So it's

Speaker 4 more DMs, I think, than people can get to.

Speaker 4 I go into my request folder every week. Yeah.
I think it's good to get a sense for what is on people's minds, what's frustrating people lately.

Speaker 4 I always respond to a handful, which usually freaks them out.

Speaker 4 And of course. Sometimes I find like important people in there that I didn't even know like that had messaged me.
I like missed it. And so I'm trying to get better at that.

Speaker 1 I've been recently, people will, I'm kind of on an anti-cameo kick because I don't know, I don't want to pay them a VIG for my likeness, but you know, shout out cameo.

Speaker 1 But so now if people DM me, I will, I'll just answer them and I'll do the request. Like if they ask for a birthday shout shout out, I'll be like, you don't have to pay me.
I'm just happy to do it.

Speaker 1 Cause this way I can do one every couple of days and feel good about it. This one girl, you tell me if this is nuts.
She's very nice.

Speaker 1 Hello, Josh, my best friend. We love you.
Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 4 She's like, will you wish her? This does not sound like my DMs.

Speaker 4 No one has ever been like, hello, Adam. I love you.
So happy you're doing such a good job. You should, we should be on the kids showing

Speaker 4 you.

Speaker 4 They crush.

Speaker 3 There's also the side of it where they call us fat, vicious pigs.

Speaker 3 Tell us how much they hate Jews.

Speaker 4 Okay, there's that side of it too. But there's plenty of that.
I got plenty of that too. Yeah, you gotta love it.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And so she says, Can you give me a birthday video for my friend? And the friend's name is C-L-E-I-L-A.

Speaker 4 C-L-E-I-L-A?

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is a smart guy. So let's see.

Speaker 4 Let's see.

Speaker 3 Kleila?

Speaker 4 Kleila.

Speaker 4 Okay. I write her back.

Speaker 1 Sure. How do you pronounce her name? How do you just write that name with due respect? A beautiful name.
But you don't just write.

Speaker 3 Is it a beautiful name?

Speaker 1 If there's a silent C,

Speaker 1 you know, you lead with that. You know? It's a silence?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 3 Oh, it's Layla?

Speaker 1 No. I asked her.
So then she sent me a voice message.

Speaker 4 You say it like. Klelia.

Speaker 4 Oh, that would never. No one's getting that.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 4 So I sent a video.

Speaker 1 I told her friend, what was up?

Speaker 1 What's up? It's Josh Peck. How are you? Don't look at this pimple right here.
What can you do? Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday. Your best friend, Louisa, asked me to do this.
So thank her.

Speaker 1 And also tell your friend, she wrote me your name. And it's beautiful, not, you know, slightly exotic, like I'd never heard it before.

Speaker 1 And she was like, oh, just can you wish my friend, Kleia, a happy birthday? And I wrote her back. I was like, can you tell me how to pronounce it?

Speaker 1 Because this could have been happy birthday, Kalia, or happy birthday,

Speaker 4 Kalindia. Like, it just would have been, I'm not a smart man, but you're a smart person, and you're a wonderful person.
And I hope you have a wonderful birthday.

Speaker 3 You're nuts. And I love the way that you code switch.
Hello, it's Josh.

Speaker 4 Hello, how are you?

Speaker 4 Hello, hello, Kalila.

Speaker 3 It's Josh here.

Speaker 1 I know. I hate my voice.
But you know what I'm saying? I really aired out the baggage for her friend Louisa, but shout out.

Speaker 4 I think it's great because if you get one that's that long, it's just it's more,

Speaker 4 there's more goodness in it. It's committed.
Do you know what has ever asked me to wish one of their friends a happy birthday?

Speaker 1 But you're open to it.

Speaker 4 Oh, I'm a jeff.

Speaker 4 Hearts and minds. You know, but you're open to it.

Speaker 1 Is there a, is there,

Speaker 1 you know, obviously Mark is in his Zuckerberg. He's in his oversized shirt era.
Are there moments where you could be like, really going to wear the chain on the outside, Mark?

Speaker 1 Can you have that shorthand?

Speaker 4 I mean, I think it's good. I think it's good for him to lean into his own style and figure out how he wants to express himself.

Speaker 4 I've definitely had a chain out at times, so I can't be throwing shade at that. All right.
All right. But I don't know.
I just feel like for a long time, it was a very... Focused uniform.

Speaker 4 It was like, you know, jeans and Adidas sandals and a gray t-shirt. So I'm glad he's exploring a little bit more on the fashion side.

Speaker 3 I love it. I think it humanizes him.
Like for so long, you were like, who is this guy? And like the second he started doing that, you were like, oh, oh, he's him.

Speaker 3 He's him with the T's. And it's like,

Speaker 4 he's a real guy. You got to be you.

Speaker 4 If you're showing up online, you know, obviously you want to be thoughtful about how you show up. But if you're inauthentic, people can sniff it out and people hate that.

Speaker 4 And so you have to find something authentic to tap into. And then if people like it, great.
And if if they don't, that's also okay.

Speaker 4 But if you're trying to hide something or pretend to be something you're not, I think people can smell that. And so I'm just like, look, you know, you be you.

Speaker 4 Whatever you're into, I think it's good to figure out how to find a piece of that that you feel comfortable sharing if you're trying to share online in the first place.

Speaker 1 I feel comfortable asking this now that it's technically also an American company.

Speaker 1 But like, is there ever a fear that like maybe there's like a spy from TikTok or like there's like someone from another social media company who's trying to like.

Speaker 4 I'm sure all of that happens. That definitely happens.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. I'm sure there are companies that have people go.
I'm sure there's, I mean, I'm sure even governments have done it or tried to do it at times.

Speaker 4 I think we try to take security really seriously, which is why we, you know, lock down access to data in a bunch of different ways. We track everything.
We're trying to be really, really careful.

Speaker 4 But at our scale, that's inevitable. Really? Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 1 So you got to call spies out there, huh?

Speaker 4 I'm not saying

Speaker 4 spying goes two ways. No, I'm just saying that we are honest about

Speaker 4 anything bad happening.

Speaker 4 Wow. So interesting.

Speaker 3 That's amazing.

Speaker 3 I would be a terrible spy. Imagine me just like undercover at TikTok working for Instagram.
They'd catch me day of.

Speaker 3 Adam, what's next for Instagram? Like, what is like, like, is there like something enormous on the horizon or is there like a new North Star?

Speaker 4 like this I just feel like you guys are so great at pivoting with the times and always sort of find like figuring out what's next like what is next there's a lot going on right now I think the well I want to acknowledge up front that I know it's frustrating when Instagram changes you feel like it's yours or you got used to it or you got good at it and all of a sudden it feels like we pulled the rug out from under you The flip side is if we didn't evolve, then we would be irrelevant.

Speaker 4 There's no way I would be, you'd ask me to be here today or I'd I'd be here today if we didn't have stories or reels or recommendations or DMs.

Speaker 4 If we were just a feed of square photos with filters, we would have kind of fallen by the wayside.

Speaker 4 The thing, so we're always trying to evolve, but stay true to our core identity of, you know, connecting people over creativity.

Speaker 4 But the thing that I'm personally really excited about right now is if a big part of what we do is help people explore their interests, get connected to creatives and whatever they're into, and then talk about them with their friends.

Speaker 4 I think a really interesting question is how can you more actively shape that? You know, we talked about talking to the algorithm before.

Speaker 4 So, actually, just this week, we started to test out this sort of tune your algorithm feature. It was inspired by a meme on threads two years ago, which is called Dear Algo.

Speaker 4 So, all these people were just writing to the algorithm, like, please stop showing me friends of my high school friends' kids, you know, like stuff like that.

Speaker 4 Stuff that we might not actually be able to deliver on. But we were with some of this new technology, particularly around AI, there are opportunities now where we can

Speaker 4 both make the algorithm more human understandable and malleable so with this one what we're starting with is relatively simple you can add things you can see what we think you're interested in and then you can add things that we may have missed and you can remove things if we're wrong about things so you can just even say i don't actually want to see anything about whatever it is maybe you're just like you know i quit American football.

Speaker 4 I just don't want to see anything about football. You can actually just do that.
Sure.

Speaker 4 And it's pretty fun to actually go and look and see what we think you're into and then then go make some corrections. And then once you do, right now it's just in Reels.

Speaker 4 When you're scrolling through Reels, well, if we showed you something that you asked for, let's say you asked for parenting advice, it would literally say with the little tag parenting advice.

Speaker 4 So you can see that you're getting it because you asked for it. Right.
And so this idea of shaping your algorithm is something I'm very excited about and is really only possible at scale.

Speaker 4 over the last year or so. So we're just starting to test this with a very small percentage of people in the U.S.
to start, but I'm hoping to get that out over the next couple months.

Speaker 1 And is it true? Like I've heard heard something to the effect of, I think, I think Tyler Cowan was talking about this on the Rick Rubin podcast. You know, I listen to economists.

Speaker 4 I'm well-rounded. I didn't graduate high school, but Rick Rubin's got some long pods.
Long pods. Yeah,

Speaker 4 he's an interesting, brilliant cat.

Speaker 1 He's smart.

Speaker 4 He's very smart.

Speaker 1 And they were saying how originally, you know, the big tech companies were trying to, especially social media companies, were acquiring these AI engineers and compensation packages that look like 10, 15 million dollars, right?

Speaker 1 But now they were saying like it's getting to a point where of this small group of like true AI cutting edge engineers, these guys are like making hundreds of millions of dollars.

Speaker 1 Like the offers have become so insane because someone high up at these companies can go, you know, if this person can give us such an edge on the AI of it all, like, yeah, like, let's just do it.

Speaker 1 Like it's, it makes sense. Like, is that where we're getting with AI? It's just such an extreme field of upside.

Speaker 4 Yes and no. So most of what you read about in terms of the offers are greatly exaggerated, but it still is a lot of money.
So I don't want to pretend like it's not.

Speaker 4 I think that some of these foundation models and cutting edge models work model work is there's really a small group of people who's really good at it.

Speaker 4 And so there's an immense amount of competition to hire that talent, which is what's driving up the cost of, you know, hiring these people.

Speaker 4 But it's pretty wild because it's some of these techniques are decades old, but a lot of it are just brand new and novel. And everyone's kind of learning on the fly.

Speaker 4 So a lot of this talent, and there's not a lot of it overall, is also like really young. These are young engineers.
Like 20s? Yeah. A lot of them are in their 20s.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Ivy's still like Ivy kids, Ivy League kids, or maybe not?

Speaker 4 Maybe not. I mean, some of them, it's, it's people, it's not something you can go learn in school.
So because it's so new, it's a bunch of techniques and technologies that are evolving very quickly.

Speaker 4 So it's people who are very quick learners, who are willing,

Speaker 4 who actively experiment.

Speaker 4 It's a much more scrappy type of engineer or researcher, really, than what we, you know, most of the valley has historically hired, which are much more like, this is the right way to build a database that serves this many millions of people over this many data, you know, these many data centers, where there's like a right way to to do it.

Speaker 4 You could write a PhD about it. This is not that.

Speaker 4 There are PhDs about the research for sure, who work in the research area, but the people who are building the applied stuff, it's a small group of people. They're very young.
They're very scrappy.

Speaker 4 It's it's kind of wild to see them do what they do.

Speaker 1 Wow. Well, Ben's lost to chat GPT.

Speaker 4 We've lost Ben.

Speaker 3 I haven't used Google in a year. I mean, it's just, it's literally, I have not used Google in a year.
I have a question.

Speaker 4 It's chat GPT for sure. And

Speaker 3 I love chat.

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Speaker 3 Ringed, like, or is it called the ring or Instagram rings?

Speaker 4 Rings, just rings. The awardship rings, rings, rings.

Speaker 3 Josh, you've heard of rings?

Speaker 1 No, what is this? Another award I'm not nominated for.

Speaker 3 Yeah, ring. Well, we need to find out how we get nominated.

Speaker 4 Really? Rings.

Speaker 4 Rings Rings is the Emmys of Instagram.

Speaker 3 They are all governing creators. They have a format.

Speaker 4 And we were nowhere to be found.

Speaker 4 We get it.

Speaker 1 Give it to iShow speed. What's his name?

Speaker 4 He's so talented.

Speaker 4 Something like that. Something like that.
Man. Oh, God.
When is that? So we just did up first.

Speaker 4 It happened. It happened.

Speaker 4 It might happen.

Speaker 3 No, we lost.

Speaker 4 It's over. We lost it.
We started small. We won that.
We started small. The idea was to try to recognize creatives from different countries and in different verticals and do something small to start.

Speaker 4 I don't think you can go out of the gate if you want this to matter long term and try to blow it out of the water. You got to build it up and earn that credibility over time.
So we'll see how it goes.

Speaker 4 But we had about

Speaker 4 12 or 13 judges who nominated people plus a bunch that we pulled just from Instagram. And then they voted.
And then we had 25 winners. We just had a dinner in New York about a week or two ago.

Speaker 4 and we gave them an actual ring designed by this amazingly talented designer named Grace Wills Bonner out of London. Actually, she got hired to be the creative director for Mez Men like the next week.

Speaker 4 And we also give them a couple kind of fun little things in Instagram. So they can

Speaker 4 they get they get a their story ring is a different style, you know,

Speaker 4 ring. They can make their profile any color they want.
So if you stumble upon one of these profiles and it's just green or wild yellow, that they're one of the winners.

Speaker 4 And there's one or two more things going to come out for them over the next couple of months. But just try to give some of the most interesting creatives and smaller ones their flowers.

Speaker 4 Some of the judges were pretty big names, but we tried to find up-and-coming talent on the, on the, on the creative side. That's cool.
Super cool.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I like the small, I like you awarding smaller creators because pretty much whatever Ben and I are sending back and forth, other than the New York City mayoral race, is

Speaker 1 Ben and I is sending, like, these people have 40 followers, but we'll be like, this is maybe some of the great comedy. That's the best stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah. When you can find a small crater, so funny crushes, that's, I think, that's the good stuff.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 And news anchor fuck-ups, Josh. Have you seen these recently? The news anchor fuck-ups.

Speaker 4 Shepard Smith.

Speaker 3 The woman reading Letits. Have you seen that one? It's the, she's trying to pronounce a town.

Speaker 4 Oh, no.

Speaker 4 She just goes, letits, and they're like, it's lettuce.

Speaker 4 I just saw a reel this morning, it was just mispronunciations, not news anchors in a row. It's getting progressively worse, worse, and worse.

Speaker 4 The only one I can remember was this guy read Manslaughter as man's laughter.

Speaker 4 Oh, that's so good.

Speaker 4 They're so good.

Speaker 4 All of them.

Speaker 4 Oh, no. All of them are so funny.
Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Can we, can I put you on the spot?

Speaker 4 Please.

Speaker 1 Can we know the president of Instagram screen time?

Speaker 4 You want to check it? Yeah, sure. On the West Message.
Fascinating. I have it.

Speaker 1 I saw you with it. Yeah.

Speaker 4 There we go. Yeah, I always put up.

Speaker 3 I was trying to figure out where you were going with that.

Speaker 4 I was like, wow, he's really asking his salary. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. I'm sure that's public.
I'm a share owner. I can find that out right now.
Oh, my. Please.

Speaker 4 I'm just going to call my rap at Robinhood.

Speaker 4 Where is it? Where's screen time? They move screen time on a new one. Here it is.
Got it. Okay.
So

Speaker 1 average this week four hours and 19 minutes a day stop it what the hell you're the president of the biggest social media company in the world and i'm double on my phone yeah well yeah why he's the president he uses your phone no

Speaker 4 it doesn't maybe is this no i think that's i mean that's what it says i didn't This phone is new, so I don't have Sunday, so maybe it dragged the average down, but I think it does it properly.

Speaker 1 Can that be? And how much time on Instagram?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 it won't, it puts all of the because they have the dev builds for all the meta apps it puts them all together so i can't really see that plus i spent a lot of time on my desktop on it so it probably underestimates it wow i'm not a big instagram desktop guy i'm not is it what's that experience like i for me it's work because i'm using it to like i like i said i like to go into the requests folder so I'll go in there when I'm working.

Speaker 4 If I'm between meetings, I'll go in there and I'll just go through a bunch of requests and send a bunch of replies.

Speaker 1 And what does a day look like for you, like an average day as the president of Instagram?

Speaker 4 It's very, it's a very strange job. So it could be, it just, I mean, there's a, there's, how do I explain this? There's a few modes of operation.
There's one like what a typical day looks like.

Speaker 4 So a typical day would be like, go to the office, you know, obviously wake up, wake up the kids. Well, they wake me up, feed them breakfast, get them out of the house.

Speaker 4 We talked about the kids' stuff before, maybe before the was recording. But the first 90 minutes is 100% about these three boys who don't listen to me.

Speaker 1 Oh, dad, I want cereal. I'm the president of Instagram.

Speaker 4 Can you get the lucky chunks? I'm on with Adam Whitehead.

Speaker 4 I'm so jealous.

Speaker 4 He's a sweetheart.

Speaker 1 He's a sweetheart.

Speaker 4 He's somebody who's the team manager.

Speaker 4 Joshua talks about Joshua as a night.

Speaker 4 Congrats, Leanne. To Bigwin.
Oh, Jesus.

Speaker 3 He says nightmares about Adam Whitehead.

Speaker 4 No, you're not.

Speaker 4 Okay, so a difficult day is just a bunch of meetings and a bunch of spreadsheets and email. It's like I'll meet with my staff, the people who work for me directly.

Speaker 4 I'll do a couple of product reviews with teams who are working on things, like maybe a team is working on like a new safety feature.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, we have a team who worked on teen accounts, which launched last year. So I'll meet with them to go over their roadmap.
I'll go represent Instagram within Meta at other meetings.

Speaker 4 So maybe there's a leadership meeting across the execs from all the family, all the apps, leads to talk about something, a one-on-one with someone. It's very schizophrenic.

Speaker 4 It could be from safety to a new creative feature to meeting a creator to having a one-on-one to, you know, I don't know, whatever else comes up. But then that's one mode of operation.

Speaker 4 And then the other mode is everything gets flipped on its head. Like I'll be on the road.

Speaker 4 So, you know, I, you know, I'll go to India and I'll meet with a bunch of creators, do it, we'll host an event. I'll do a meeting with a minister or a policymaker.

Speaker 4 I'll do some press, you know, and then I'll get on a plane to go to New York and it'll it'll be a completely different three days you know so it can be and that's very like the everything is different for between two and ten days and then i go back to my normal routine do you get briefed in the morning like does your team go like here's what happened in the last 24 hours on instagram or here oh no that sounds nice no i i have a bunch of dashboards that i look at so in the morning i will almost always start by getting a sense of, you know, my inbox.

Speaker 4 So, you know, I get a lot of emails.

Speaker 4 And then I'll take a look at what's what how the platform is doing so i'll look at all right like how you know are people using it you know more or less are they sharing more or less you know what does it look like how did they how do the trends look in different countries is there something unexpected going on to just sort of ground myself in the data and what what happens when like you get a call that Kanye is popping off right on on Instagram.

Speaker 1 I'm sure people are going to love three Jews talking about Kanye.

Speaker 4 But like, you know, what could go wrong?

Speaker 1 It's a part.

Speaker 1 It's a part of, or

Speaker 1 he just came to mind, but like someone with a massive amount of followers is starting to go,

Speaker 1 be slightly erratic. What does that chain of command look like? What, what actions

Speaker 4 are taken? So if someone, so. Even if you're Kanye, if you're anybody who's a big account, if you're violating the community standards and the content

Speaker 4 isn't allowed on Instagram, it'll get taken down.

Speaker 4 So that's not really much of a conversation.

Speaker 4 If someone is like pushing the boundaries or starting to get a little, you know, it looks like they might be going in a weird place or something's off, it's it's the partnerships team that'll handle it.

Speaker 4 So they'll like try to talk to them and they'll be like, hey, just so you know, like this is what's allowed, this is what's not allowed.

Speaker 4 Like try to make sure that they have good information so they can make informed decisions about what to do or not do on the platform. And then, but ultimately they get to decide.

Speaker 4 And then we have to try and do our best to balance both speech, which we believe in deeply and we think it's super important, but also safety, which matters a ton.

Speaker 1 But it must also be it, you know, when you're going to lock someone out of their account that's a super public person, I'm sure there's, there's a big conversation, right, of how close to the edge are they getting?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. We'll try to just make sure we don't make any mistakes.

Speaker 4 So if it's someone, if it's a major account, we'll just try to make sure, because we make it, I mean, there's millions of things reported every day, if not more.

Speaker 4 So there's systems that try to do this at scale. There's both classifiers and technology, but also tens of thousands of people who look at content and make decisions.
They're content moderators.

Speaker 4 But if it's a major account, we'll just try to really make sure that we don't make a mistake.

Speaker 4 We'll double, triple check it, make sure someone senior looks at it and is like, no, this is or this is not violating. Right.
Good to know.

Speaker 3 It's more costly than

Speaker 4 big accounts. So we try to invest more to make sure we make less mistakes.
But we want to make less mistakes everywhere. It's not good for us ever to make a mistake.

Speaker 4 I mean, you think about someone like who is the number one person ronaldo on instagram by followers yeah it might be i think it might be i mean i actually think that instagram account might be the biggest is the biggest but that's not really fair so ronaldo is one of the biggest why is that not fair just because it it might not get as much engagement as someone with less followers no it's just it is on instagram you expect people to go find and search for instagram i think it's just i'm i'm surprised that you guys didn't pull a you two

Speaker 3 on like what what

Speaker 4 when on the Apple on the Apple production

Speaker 3 you got yeah like you got the nano and that stupid U2 album was on

Speaker 4 like I'm surprised you plugged in your phone into your car for like five years yes

Speaker 4 you would play that stupid yeah it was bad yes it would it would play bad like I'm surprised that when you I'm surprised that when you download Instagram you're not automatic like I'm surprised that Instagram doesn't have three billion followers no I think it's good for us to to I mean look it would be it it wouldn't be crazy people have done it but i think it's good for us to experience what it's like to actually try to use the platform and that that builds empathy but also just understanding what's working what's not there's not that many people who work at instagram who have large followings there's maybe like two or three of us so actually i find bugs all the time that the team doesn't find because they don't have the same experience because they don't have thousands of people messaging them angry things, you know, so they like their DMs just look very different.

Speaker 4 The request folder loads just fine for them. And I'm like, this is slow as hell.
Like we got to fix this.

Speaker 1 Can you ever reply with a little sass?

Speaker 4 Just a little.

Speaker 4 I think about it all the time. I think about it all the time.

Speaker 4 I have recently. Really?

Speaker 4 Give me a good example.

Speaker 3 Khalila. Khalila was a little sass.

Speaker 4 She was a little. That was cute.

Speaker 1 I work with a foundation called Feed the Streets in LA. We're a very small grassroots, and we do four feeds a week on Skid Row, MacArthur Park, just helping to grow.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's like where they need it most. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's great. And it's just a group of us.
And so when I'm there, I always will try to post something because I have 17 million followers, like

Speaker 1 can't hurt. Yeah.
And also, we don't have a social media team. Yeah.
And someone wrote me something to the effect of like feeding the homeless and posting it on your social media. What a loser.

Speaker 4 And I was like, this will not stand.

Speaker 4 Someone said something on the internet somewhere I disagree with. I must engage.
I was like, brother.

Speaker 1 So I wrote him back. I said, hi.

Speaker 4 I was like,

Speaker 1 so glad you discovered Feed the Streets on social media, as many of our volunteers have because of posts like this.

Speaker 1 I said, please feel free to join us anytime. And I ended it with, I'm there every week.
Come find me, dog.

Speaker 4 Oh, man. come

Speaker 4 find me dog but you know it was inferred

Speaker 4 no i don't think that i don't think i don't think it's, I don't think it would go well for me to get sassy. So I think I should just keep it straight.

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Speaker 3 I have a very random question. With 3 billion users, do you guys ever think about incubating products? Like, obviously, like, you guys are the marketplace for advertising.

Speaker 3 You have creators advertising. You have creators launching their own brands.
Like, you could obviously have the greatest VC incubation arm of CPG products of all time. Like,

Speaker 3 is that ever a thought?

Speaker 4 Not really. I mean, we've talked about it.

Speaker 4 I think in general, we would rather be a marketing platform for the people who are going to be better at building products than us to market and find audiences for those products. I think in general,

Speaker 4 it's a very fortunate opportunity for us to be a platform. It doesn't come without its responsibilities.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of responsibility for it, but it's nice to not have to deal with producing much hardware outside of the data centers. It's nice not to...

Speaker 4 have to produce a ton of content outside of our own channels. I think a platform is just a remarkably amazing business.
Now, look, as a company, we do get into other industries, right?

Speaker 4 You know, we make hardware with, you know, the sort of smart glasses and the AR glasses. And we've done, obviously, virtual reality headsets.

Speaker 1 Patagonia jackets.

Speaker 4 Patagonia jackets.

Speaker 4 I said that when we were weighing together. But for Instagram, I think we like to try to...
We like to try to keep it focused. I feel like Instagram is too complicated as it is.

Speaker 4 In general, I'm trying to figure out ways for us to do less things and do them better.

Speaker 4 And so I think focus is really a major part of the ethos that kevin and mike really started the company and the group with and so i want to make sure we stay true to that i but it has to be so hard to stay that focused right like i again this is why i i should never be the president of instagram but with three billion users like you could take out uber tomorrow like you can just you can just build uber like the the hardest thing is acquiring three billion people yeah it's yeah i know it's mind-blowing to me like it's an immense amount of reach and opportunity but i also think we often underestimate what it takes to do something well.

Speaker 4 And so I still feel like we don't do most of what we should do as well as we should. I'm constantly feeling like we should be doing better.
I'm constantly feeling like I should be doing better.

Speaker 4 Maybe that's just my, you know,

Speaker 4 my, my, my character trait or flaw. But I would watch, I'd much rather get to best in class across the key things first before expanding to something else if I could.

Speaker 1 This is you, one of our last two questions. This is, you know, this is asked during all presidential elections, and you're a president.

Speaker 4 I'm definitely not a president, but let's do it.

Speaker 4 What keeps you up at night? Oh, my God. All I do is worry.

Speaker 1 About Instagram.

Speaker 4 How many times, how many things do you want?

Speaker 1 Like, what could cut, like, what's the call you fear? A server went down? Like, Adam Wahid moves to TikTok.

Speaker 4 Still going back to Adam.

Speaker 4 I think most of my concerns ladder up to us,

Speaker 4 I think, failing to adapt as the world changes around us.

Speaker 4 So, you know, we're a big company. The team is big.
The team is thousands of people. The company is, you know, tens of thousands of people.

Speaker 4 And usually what happens when you're in a position like we are is that not, it's not that. Competition isn't a risk.
Sorry, it's not that competition isn't a risk. Competition is a risk.

Speaker 4 What really happens is competition adapts to the world as it changes faster than you do.

Speaker 4 So whether it is, you know, minimizing the bad, so addressing safety concerns and keeping people safe on the platform, or it's maximizing the good, leaning into whatever the new trend is on how people entertain themselves or connect with friends, you know, if you don't move quickly, someone else will.

Speaker 4 And you might move slower because you're too risk adverse or you're too worried about, you know, revenue this quarter or you are not connected with what the trends are that are happening or there's too much regulatory burden or there's too much infighting and or complacency like it almost always ladders up to failing to adapt and so i i worry most of my fears are about us missing things that are important either opportunities to maximize the good or minimize the bad and then that really adding up over time and getting the better of us yeah you need to be more like that ben we you need i definitely do you're the president of this spot i think you're doing great he is

Speaker 4 thank you

Speaker 4 i appreciate you the real business.

Speaker 4 I'm the actor kind of. The talent? What do you call it? The talent.

Speaker 3 Just double clicking on that for one second. I just, as you have three kids, Josh has three kids.
I have a baby boy.

Speaker 3 We spoke about this on the last podcast. Like, when are we going to allow our kids to even have phones? Good question.
And Josh and I are big proponents of really, really, really fucking late. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 you're talking about like Instagram for teens.

Speaker 3 Like, how do you approach, like, there's, there's two sides to the coin right of course make instagram safe i'm sure that's something that keeps you up at night but on this on the flip side of that like just like these constant dopamine hits no matter how safe instagram is for kids phones in general like do you have a do you have a perspective on that like like when should kids really be downloading apps when should they be getting smartphones do you have a perspective there yeah i mean I would say a few different things.

Speaker 4 And maybe I'll take off my Instagram hat for a second and just focus on me, Adam, as a dad. I think it's important

Speaker 4 to be honest about the fact that every kid is different and their needs and their risks are different.

Speaker 4 I wouldn't be surprised if I don't feel that my three boys are already at the same age for smartphones or for social media.

Speaker 4 They're so different. You only have one, so you probably don't know this yet, but you've got three.
There's no better lesson on the question of nature versus nurture than having three.

Speaker 4 And you're like, you are all completely different. And I'm pretty sure I raised you more or less the same.
Yeah. And so I think it's about, one, understanding your individual child's needs.

Speaker 4 And then two, trying to meet those needs. But for me, I think what matters is boundaries.
I think it's super important for parents to set boundaries in general.

Speaker 4 My mom always used to tell me when I went out of the house as a college, as a high school kid, she always say moderation, which I thought was like a reasonable but realistic ask.

Speaker 4 But for me, with my kids, they're not old enough for social media. They're nine, seven, and five, but they have iPads.

Speaker 4 They play video games and for me it's like okay well what are the rules right they have they can only play it on the weekends they have to earn their time so that you know for every 30 minutes of homework that they do they earn 30 minutes and i'll never take the time away because i used to do that and that was wildly dysregulating and that ended up really badly for everybody but it's capped and so they know it they know they're not allowed to play until 7 a.m so they don't have an excuse to come into my room at 5 a.m and wake me up to try to get on an ipad so just create boundaries what's hard it's But I would want to acknowledge like it's much easier said than done.

Speaker 4 We're trying as a platform to provide tools to help parents enforce those boundaries. So you can actually say, my teen can only use Instagram on these days or for this amount of time.

Speaker 4 You can actually, you know, set that up and then we will enforce it on your behalf.

Speaker 4 But I think that combination of understanding an individual child's needs and risks and then setting up clear boundaries, I think is maybe the two most important pieces of advice I would give a parent when trying to decide when is your kid ready for a phone or a lot of kids I know my kids don't have them yet are getting like smart watches because a parent in a city wants to know where the kid is

Speaker 4 or you know access to the internet like my my kid wants access to the computer now because he likes to do research about Pokemon and things and honestly you know if he can open up Safari he can and he's pretty smart he can get he can find anything And so it's not just about social media or even phones.

Speaker 4 It's just if you have access to the internet, you have access to anything that you could find on the internet if you want, if you want looking for it.

Speaker 4 So I think, you know, there's, it's important for parents to set up boundaries and to educate their kids and to think about their kids' individual needs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Isn't it crazy? Pokemon was big for us and now it's big for our kids.

Speaker 4 I cannot believe how big it is. They love it.
They obsess. Yeah.
My kid can rattle off like the evolutions of any random Pokemon from like any series. He just like studies them

Speaker 4 for fun.

Speaker 1 Like my kid, he just goes a shiny one.

Speaker 4 I took notes. I was like, you got to meet your kids where they hide.
So I was like, explain this to me. It's complicated.
It is. The card game is really complicated.
Yeah. There's a lot going on.

Speaker 1 Okay, so before our final question, what are your nuts moment of the week? I just want to say here officially, there is a such thing as shadow banning or there isn't.

Speaker 4 So it means different things to different people. Okay.
People use that term to say they're not getting as much reach as they think they deserve.

Speaker 4 There are instances in which we will limit someone's reach.

Speaker 4 So if you've posted a bunch of content that got taken down recently, if you're not, if you're posting content that doesn't violate our community guidelines, but we don't, but violates our recommendation guidelines, so we won't show it to people who don't follow you, you will have limited reach, but you can see it.

Speaker 4 You can go to profile, settings, account status, and you can see if there are any issues on your account, and then you can try to either appeal them if you think we made a mistake.

Speaker 4 or remove the content if you you know see that that's why you're not being recommended anymore and so you can go see it so but yes your account can have its reach limited, but you can go to profile settings account status and then see what's going on and then act on that information.

Speaker 1 And then once you correct it, I find there's, there've been a few times and it's really the only times that I've ever posted anything political. I'll just see just it's just a downtrend in

Speaker 4 reach

Speaker 1 after I post any and it's rare, maybe every couple years.

Speaker 4 And then I just give it a couple of days and it like shakes out like it sort of has to find its medium but it takes like a week or two so what's probably happening there without looking into your specific account is it's not that you're posted about politics we're like no we want to downrank politics we don't do that it's that a lot of people who followed you because you don't normally post about politics didn't follow you for your political opinions.

Speaker 4 Right. And so they maybe were less likely to interact or like or share that when they saw it.

Speaker 4 And so we just, it looks like it's doing less well to us than the normal piece of content we don't even know if it's about politics it's just getting less engagement per impression than your average post and so it does less well because we just think it's less interesting to other people whereas there are accounts who post about politics all the time and that's why people follow them and they tend to do well in general so if you if you really pivot subjects often you know either to or away from something politics or otherwise you know you can often see your reach go down because it's just because that's not why people followed you in the first book Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Speaker 4 You should just know why it's happening.

Speaker 1 Good to know. That's it.
No more endorsements from Josh Pack.

Speaker 4 It's okay.

Speaker 4 It's funny.

Speaker 3 It's funny, Josh. When I write a political Megilla on Instagram stories, it gets the most reach out of anything.
I'm not even kidding.

Speaker 4 But you...

Speaker 3 When I post like a static with text on stories, it destroys

Speaker 3 versus when I do a vit, it's so weird. It's like, like, like destroys.

Speaker 4 Some people find photos. It's like 30% of

Speaker 4 Videos.

Speaker 4 Most people find the opposite, but I definitely hear regularly from creators who find that either carousels and feed with photos or stories or photos and stories do better for them than videos.

Speaker 4 I hear that regularly.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So my dear Ben,

Speaker 1 I must say, you are like, I know you always say you're not political. I would say you're political adjacent.

Speaker 1 And I don't think that's negative, but I think you make sure when you feel passionate about something, you speak up.

Speaker 3 100%. I guess it was more to what Adam said, which is, I don't think anybody followed me for my political opinions or for my commentary.

Speaker 3 So the fact that they do so well had me thinking, is it simply the format that I'm putting text on,

Speaker 3 like that it's not a video versus what I'm actually saying? I don't know the answer, but I just always found it incredibly interesting that like a story like that will get 400,000 views.

Speaker 4 And it's like, that's

Speaker 3 a third of my reach. Like, why is it, why is it so big?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because your feed is like, goes from, look at this big Kanish to what's Gavin Newsom thinking.

Speaker 4 Yes, we got him. By the way, honestly, that's

Speaker 4 that's true.

Speaker 3 It goes from a salami to Mamdani.

Speaker 4 Should we

Speaker 1 get to what are you nuts, man?

Speaker 4 What? Oh, yeah. Absolutely, Adam.

Speaker 3 This is gripes with people, places, and things, whatever's sticking in your crawl. San Francisco, you're a walking what are you nuts?

Speaker 3 You absolutely have one. Okay.

Speaker 4 What do you have one?

Speaker 1 I think we can go first.

Speaker 1 This is our final question. So we each do one.
Do you want to think about it?

Speaker 4 I can tell you the first one that came to my mind, but I'm also happy to let you guys go first.

Speaker 4 I would love it.

Speaker 3 Okay. Okay.
Fine. Yeah, fine.
But if one popped into your head that was good, feel free.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, I'll give you. So I just, I don't want to sound like a bad dad, but

Speaker 4 my seven-year-old is the first thing that popped into my head. So, my wife doesn't get up early.
I usually get up before she does, and I'm kind of on breakfast duty.

Speaker 4 She comes down, and at seven, I mean, it's all all morning from 6 a.m. on, it's unbelievable with this one.

Speaker 4 So, first, he will, I don't know why I should say this on being recorded, but he will come into my room at around six on the dot. He'll come into my bathroom and he'll take his morning poop.

Speaker 4 That's solid.

Speaker 4 He has a bathroom, he has no reason for him here.

Speaker 4 At least now he's old enough. What he used to yell, like, will someone wipe my body?

Speaker 4 That's how I wake up at like 5.50 in the morning. And then it's just a fight

Speaker 4 for the next 90 minutes. It's like, you know, he punches his friend, his brother in the back of the head for no reason.
He won't eat his whatever. It's eggs and bacon.
Who doesn't like bacon?

Speaker 4 And then the thing that really gets me is that like 7.55, we leave at 8. I'll be like, all right, everybody out.
Like shoes and socks. I'm like, I'm like, done.
I need to get you guys out now.

Speaker 4 Shoes and socks. Everyone, shoes and socks on.
And then, you know, you know, I shepherd them over.

Speaker 4 And he will just turn around, walk straight to the couch, and then pick up the remote and turn on the TV and then yell at me, where's the baseball game? And I'm like, what are you doing?

Speaker 4 First of all, there's no baseball game. It's eight in the morning.
Like, we just said everyone, your brother's by the, he's getting his shoes on.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 4 his ability to completely ignore. me entirely is unbelievable.

Speaker 4 I have this, this, the contrast between going to work and saying the wrong thing and having 50 people go in the wrong direction for a month and fighting for like fifth most influential in my household because like my seven-year-old, my wife, my nine-year-old, my five-year-old, and then me and the nanny are battling for fifth on a daily basis is like unbelievable.

Speaker 4 I just wish like I had a little bit more sway at home and a little bit less at work, but he's the one who's always humbling. It's just, I can say he just walks away.

Speaker 4 just you're like go left he's like i'm gonna go right now and just walks away sorry i'm it's it does doesn't mean nuts. It is different than will you nuts.

Speaker 3 No, it's perfect. And the next time he does that, you say, what are you nuts? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Say,

Speaker 4 what are you?

Speaker 1 We're late for school. Show hates pitching a no-hitter.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Son, you're delusional.
We've got to go.

Speaker 4 That's literally my life.

Speaker 4 Every morning. I love it.
That's a great.

Speaker 3 That's a great one. My what are you nuts moment? I was

Speaker 3 I was at Equinox the other day on the treadmill and I was very proudly. Josh knows three and a half speed, 12 inclined, 30 minutes.
I'm grooving. Nice.
Stay Adam. I'm grooving.

Speaker 4 Good, low intensity, steady state.

Speaker 3 Corner of my eye, I see an older gentleman, probably 60 years old. Just see him.
Two drumsticks, drumming, drumming. He's sitting.
He's next to like a machine, air drumming.

Speaker 4 drumming drumming.

Speaker 3 All of a sudden, I see he takes a stick, throws it against the floor. He tries to catch it.
He He misses it. It bounces away.
He goes back. He's drumming.
He throws it against the floor.

Speaker 3 He tries to catch it. He misses it.

Speaker 4 He's drumming. He throws it against the floor.

Speaker 3 He finally catches it.

Speaker 4 He goes, yeah.

Speaker 4 And he is just practicing.

Speaker 3 He is practicing drumming. AirPods in, like full endurance level drumming at the gym, fully air drums.
What are you nuts? Okay, this is Equinox. Do you know where the fuck you are?

Speaker 3 Are you out of your goddamn mind? Like, what are you even doing?

Speaker 3 like everybody is looking at him like this guy is this guy is crazy and he is just air pods in drumming and like his foot you can't see my foot they can see my foot you guys can't see my foot because of the new mac and the way it zooms in on my face so close he's like doing the pedal with his foot and jamming his wrists insanity completely nuts i feel like you gotta say hi to that

Speaker 4 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 3 He's going to shive me on the way out. I have no interest in saying hi to that guy.
Literally, a little knife comes out of one of his drum sticks. I have no interest in

Speaker 3 that crazy man.

Speaker 1 My what are you nuts is, as we all know, I'm a Costco daddy. Love a Costco.

Speaker 4 Love a sample.

Speaker 1 Look, one sample per person is what are you nuts. If your sample is off the charts, be proud and let me get another.
What are you nuts? Let me go for round two. What's the big deal? It's a sample.

Speaker 1 Like, you're not going to go under from a sample.

Speaker 1 And I don't, because I do go for a second and we got to do the no eye contact where I just look away and then I just go like I act like I'm on a doll or I'm looking at my watch.

Speaker 1 And, but like, can't I just like look at you dead in the eyes and go, that was fabulous. I'll have another.

Speaker 4 What are you nuts?

Speaker 3 I used to do that, Josh. I'm sure you did this too.
As overweight youth, I would walk around.

Speaker 3 I would walk around the mall and I would like grab like a nice sesame chicken taster from the Chinese place. And then I would come back around with my hood up and I would grab another one.

Speaker 4 Oh my God.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 1 So are you going to get Tifa? No, I'm just fat.

Speaker 4 I'm just

Speaker 4 starving.

Speaker 4 I would go back.

Speaker 4 And I would, I will go back and I'll take two extra, but then I'll also take the thing and buy it. That's like my, like, that's like my covers.

Speaker 4 Like, all right, I will buy these pops of whatever popcorn things, but I'm, but I'm also going to take a couple extra. I feel like that like gets me the cover I need.
Smart.

Speaker 3 That's why he's suppressing. That balances out well.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Thank you for doing this.

Speaker 4 Adam.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's been an absolute

Speaker 3 pleasure, Adam. Thank you so much for joining us.
Anything that you want to plug? Anything that you want to say before we hop off?

Speaker 4 No, I just appreciate the time. I think it's parenting is tough.
A little humor goes a long way. So I was excited to come and meet you all.
So thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 Thanks. Adam Moseri is a good guy, folks.
Listen to this podcast. This is five stars.
Otherwise, what are you nuts? Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts. Watch us on YouTube.

Speaker 3 Share our clips, Instagram, and TikTok. Sorry.

Speaker 4 Mondays and Thursdays, folks.

Speaker 3 We will see you

Speaker 3 next time.

Speaker 6 Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services.

Speaker 6 Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.