#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

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Speaker 2 All right, bro. What's happening? Good to see you.
You too? What's going on?

Speaker 1 You know, chill week. Yeah,

Speaker 1 sort of.

Speaker 2 This recent announcement that you did about content moderation, how has that been received?

Speaker 1 Probably depends depends on who you ask.

Speaker 1 But look, I mean,

Speaker 1 I've been working on this for a long time. So, I mean, you got to do what you think is right.
You know, we've been on a long, long journey here.

Speaker 1 And I think at some level,

Speaker 1 you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice.

Speaker 1 The whole point of social media is basically, you know, giving people the ability to share what they want. Right.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, it goes back to

Speaker 1 our original mission

Speaker 1 is just give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, what do you think started the pathway towards increasing censorship? Because clearly we were going in that direction for the last few years.

Speaker 2 It seemed like we really found out about it when Elon bought Twitter and we got the Twitter files.

Speaker 2 And when you came on here, and when you were were explaining the relationship with FBI, where they were trying to get you to take down certain things that were true and real, and certain things, they tried to get you to limit the exposure to them.

Speaker 2 So it's these kind of conversations. Like, when did all that start?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well,

Speaker 1 well, look, I think going back to the beginning, or like I was saying, I think you start one of these if you care about giving people a voice.

Speaker 1 You know, I wasn't too deep on our content policies for like the first 10 years of the company.

Speaker 1 It was just kind of well known across the company that we were trying to give people the ability to share as much as possible. And issues would come up, practical issues, right?

Speaker 1 So, if someone's getting bullied, for example, we'd deal with that, right? We put in place systems to fight bullying.

Speaker 1 You know, if someone is saying,

Speaker 1 hey,

Speaker 1 you know, someone's pirating copyrighted content on the service, it's like, okay, we'll build controls to make it so we'll find IP-protected content. But it was really in the last 10 years

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 people started pushing for ideological-based censorship. And I think it was two main events that really triggered this.
In 2016, there was the election of President Trump,

Speaker 1 also coincided with basically Brexit in the EU and sort of the fragmentation of the EU.

Speaker 1 And then in 2020, there was COVID. And I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time,

Speaker 1 we just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to

Speaker 1 basically start censoring content on ideological grounds. Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

Speaker 2 I'm sorry to interrupt you, but when it first came up in 2016, did it come under the guise of the Russian collusion hoax?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and this is the thing, at the time I was really sort of ill-prepared to

Speaker 1 kind of parse what was going on.

Speaker 1 I think part of my reflection looking back on this is

Speaker 1 I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath, I gave too much deference to

Speaker 1 a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, okay, there's no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation. People can't actually believe this stuff, right?

Speaker 1 It has to be that there's this kind of like massive misinformation out there.

Speaker 1 Some of it started with the Russia collusion stuff, but it kind of morphed into different things over time. Well,

Speaker 2 he was so ideologically polarizing, right? Like, people didn't want to believe that anybody looked at him and said, this should be our president.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 1 I took this

Speaker 1 and just kind of assumed that everyone was acting in good faith. And I said, okay, well, there's like, there are concerns about misinformation.
We should...

Speaker 1 Just like when people raised other concerns in the past and we try to deal with them. Okay, yeah, people,

Speaker 1 you know, know, if you ask people, no one says that they want misinformation. So maybe there's something that we should do to basically try to address this.

Speaker 1 But I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world.

Speaker 1 That's like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service. And

Speaker 1 so we tried to put in place

Speaker 1 a system that would deal with it.

Speaker 1 And early on, tried to basically make it so that

Speaker 1 it was really limited. We're like, all right, we're just going to have this system where there's these third-party fact checkers and they can check the worst of the worst stuff.

Speaker 1 So things that are very clear hoaxes, that there's like, it's not like, like, we're not parsing speech about whether something is slightly true or slightly false, like Earth is flat,

Speaker 1 you know, things like that, right? So that was sort of the original intent. We put in place the system and it just sort of veered from there.

Speaker 1 I think to some degree, it's because some of the people whose job is to do fact-checking, a lot of their industry is focused on political fact-checking.

Speaker 1 So they're just kind of veered in that direction.

Speaker 1 We kept on trying to basically get it to be what we had originally intended, which is just, you know, it's not, the point isn't to like judge people's opinions. It's to provide this layer

Speaker 1 to kind of help fact-check some of the stuff that seems the most extreme. But

Speaker 1 it just, you know, it was just never accepted by people broadly. I think people just felt like the fact-checkers were too biased.

Speaker 1 Not necessarily even so much in what they ruled, although sometimes I think people would disagree with that. A lot of the time, it was just what types of things they chose to even go and fact-check

Speaker 1 in the first place. So

Speaker 1 I kind of think like after having gone through that whole exercise, it,

Speaker 1 I don't know, it's something out of like, you know, 1984, one of these books where it's just like, it really is a slippery slope.

Speaker 1 And it just got to a point where it's just, okay, this is destroying so much trust, especially in the United States, to have this program.

Speaker 1 And I guess it was probably about a few years that I really started coming to the conclusion that we were going to need to change something about that.

Speaker 1 COVID was the other big one

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 that was also very tricky because,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 at the beginning it was, you know, it's like a legitimate public health crisis, you know, in the beginning. And it's,

Speaker 1 you know, even people who are like the most ardent

Speaker 1 First Amendment,

Speaker 1 you know, defenders, the Supreme Court has this clear precedent that's like, all right, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. There are times when if there's an emergency,

Speaker 1 your ability to speak can temporarily be curtailed in order to get an emergency under control. So I was sympathetic to that at the beginning beginning of COVID.

Speaker 1 It seemed like, okay, you have this virus. It seems like it's killing a lot of people.
I don't know, like we didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be.

Speaker 1 So at the beginning, it kind of seemed like, okay,

Speaker 1 we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this. But when it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve to,

Speaker 1 you know, and like in the beginning, it was like, okay, there aren't enough masks. Masks aren't that important.
To then it's like, oh, no, you have to wear a mask.

Speaker 1 And, you know, like everything was shifting around I it's become very difficult to kind of follow and and this really hit

Speaker 1 the most extreme

Speaker 1 I'd say during

Speaker 1 it was during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out

Speaker 1 the vaccine program and

Speaker 1 now I'm generally like pretty pro rolling out vaccines I think on balance the vaccines are more positive than negative but

Speaker 1 I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it.

Speaker 1 And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true. I mean, they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that

Speaker 1 says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I was just like, well, we're not going to do that. Like, we're clearly not going to do that.
I mean,

Speaker 1 that is kind of inarguably true. Who is they?

Speaker 2 Who's telling you to take down things? Yeah, it was. They talk about vaccine side effects.
It was people in

Speaker 1 the Biden administration. I think it was, you know, I wasn't involved in those conversations directly, but I think it was...

Speaker 2 How difficult is that to not be involved in those conversations directly?

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That's got to be strange too, right?

Speaker 2 Because you're running the company, but there's clearly you're moderating at scale that's beyond the imagination. The number of human beings you're moderating is fucking insane.

Speaker 2 Like, what is, well, what's a Facebook,

Speaker 2 how many people use it on a daily basis? Forget about how many overall.

Speaker 1 Like, how many people use it regularly? It's 3.2 billion people use one of our services every day. That's.
Yeah. No, it's wild.
More than a third of the planet. That's so crazy.

Speaker 1 It's almost half of Earth. Well, on a monthly basis, it is probably half.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 just,

Speaker 2 I want to say that, though, for there's a lot of hypercritical people that are conspiracy theorists and think that everybody is a part of some cabal to control them.

Speaker 2 I want you to understand that whether it's YouTube or all these, whatever place that you think is doing something that's awful, it's good that you speak because this is how things get changed.

Speaker 2 And this is how people find out that people are upset about content moderation and censorship. But moderating at scale is insane.
Yeah. It's insane.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 What we were talking the other day about the number of videos that go up every hour on YouTube and it's bananas. It's bananas.

Speaker 2 To try to get a human being that is reasonable,

Speaker 2 logical, and objective that's going to analyze every video, it's virtually impossible.

Speaker 1 It's not possible.

Speaker 2 So you've got to use a bunch of tools. You're going to get a bunch of things wrong.
And you have also people reporting things. And how much is that going to affect things?

Speaker 2 You could have mass reporting because you have bad actors. You have some corporation that decides we're going to attack this video because it's bad for us to get it taken down.

Speaker 2 There's so much going on. Just, I want to put that in people's heads before we go on.
Like, understand the kind of numbers that we're talking about here. Now, understand you have

Speaker 2 the pandemic, and then you have the administration that's doing something where I think they crossed the line, where it gets really weird, where they were saying what you were saying.

Speaker 2 They were trying to get you to take down vaccine side effects, effects, which is just crazy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so, I mean, like you're saying, I mean, this is,

Speaker 1 it's so complicated, this system, that I could spend every minute of all of my time doing this and not actually focused on building any of the things that we're trying to do.

Speaker 1 AI, glasses, like the future of social media, all that stuff. So

Speaker 1 I get involved in this stuff, but... In general, we have a policy team.
There are people who I trust. There are the people who are kind of working on this on a day-to-day basis.

Speaker 1 And the interactions that

Speaker 1 I was just referring to, I mean, a lot of this is documented. I mean, because,

Speaker 1 you know, Jim Jordan and the House had this whole investigation and committee into

Speaker 1 the kind of government censorship around stuff like this. And we produced all these documents and it's all in the public domain.
I mean, basically, these people from the Biden administration would...

Speaker 1 Call up our team and like scream at them and curse. And it's like these documents are, it's all kind of out there.

Speaker 2 Did you record any of those phone calls?

Speaker 1 I don't, know.

Speaker 1 I don't think we were. But I think

Speaker 2 there are emails.

Speaker 1 The emails are published. It's all kind of out there.
And

Speaker 1 they're like,

Speaker 1 and basically it just got to this point where we were like, no,

Speaker 1 we're not going to take down things that are true. That's ridiculous.
They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV talking about how 10 years from now or something,

Speaker 1 you know, you're going to see an ad that says, okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you're eligible

Speaker 1 for this kind of payment, like this sort of like class action lawsuit type meme. And they're like, no, you have to take that down.
And we just said, no, we're not going to take down humor and satire.

Speaker 1 We're not going to take down things that are true.

Speaker 1 And then at some point,

Speaker 1 I guess.

Speaker 1 I don't know, it flipped a bit. I mean, Biden, when he was, he gave some statement at some point.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it was a press conference or to some journalist where he basically was like, these guys are killing people. And

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I don't know. Then, like, all these different agencies and branches of government basically just, like, started investigating and coming after our company.
It was, it was brutal. It was brutal.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's just a massive overstepping.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and what massive people you weren't killing people.

Speaker 2 This is the thing about all of this. It's like they suppressed so much information about things that people should be doing, regardless of whether or not you believe in the vaccine.

Speaker 2 Regardless, put that aside. Metabolic health is of the utmost importance in your everyday life, whether there's a pandemic or there's not.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of things that you can do that can help you recover from illness. It prevents illnesses.
It makes your body more robust and healthy. It strengthens your immune system.

Speaker 2 And they were suppressing all that information. And that's just crazy.

Speaker 2 You can't say you're one of the good guys if you're suppressing information that would help people recover from all kinds of diseases, not just COVID, the flu, common cold, all sorts of different things, high doses of vitamin C, D3 with K2 and magnesium.

Speaker 2 They were suppressing this stuff because they didn't want people to think that you could get away with not taking a vaccine, which is really crazy when you're talking about something that 99.07%

Speaker 2 of people survive. This is a crazy overstep, but scared the shit shit out of a lot of people.

Speaker 2 Red-pilled, as it were, a lot of people, because they realized, like, oh,

Speaker 2 1984 is like an instruction manual. It's like, it shows you how things can go that way with wrong speak and with bizarre distortion of facts.

Speaker 2 And when it comes down to it, in today's day and age, the way people get information is through your platform, through X.

Speaker 2 This is how people are getting information. They're getting information from YouTube.
They're getting information from a bunch of different sources now.

Speaker 2 And you can't censor that if it's real legitimate information because it's not ideologically convenient for you.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So, I mean, that's basically the journey that I've been on, right? Started off very pro-free speech, free expression.

Speaker 1 You know, and then over the last 10 years, there have been these two big episodes.

Speaker 1 It was the Trump election and the aftermath, where I feel like in retrospect, I deferred too much to the kind of critique of the media on what we should do.

Speaker 1 And since then, I think generally trust in media has fallen off a cliff, right? So I don't think I'm alone in that journey. I think that's basically

Speaker 1 the experience that a lot of people have had is, okay,

Speaker 1 the stuff that's being written about is not kind of all accurate.

Speaker 1 And even if the facts are right, it's kind of written from a slant a lot of the time. Of course.
And then

Speaker 1 there was the government version of it, which is during COVID, which is okay.

Speaker 1 It's like our government is telling us that we need to censor true things. It's like, this is a disaster.
And it's, you know, it's not just the U.S., right? I think

Speaker 1 a lot of people in the U.S.

Speaker 1 focus on this as an American phenomenon. But I kind of think that the reaction to COVID probably caused a breakdown in trust in a lot of governments around the world.

Speaker 1 Because I mean, you know, 2024 was a big election year around the world. And

Speaker 1 there were all these countries, India,

Speaker 1 just like a ton of countries that had that had elections. And the incumbents basically lost every single one.

Speaker 1 So there is some sort of a global phenomenon where the

Speaker 1 whether it was because of inflation, because of the economic policies to deal with

Speaker 1 COVID or just how the governments dealt with COVID

Speaker 1 seems to have had this effect that's global. Not just the U.S., but like a very broad decrease in trust, at least in that set of incumbents and maybe in sort of these democratic institutions overall.

Speaker 1 So I think that what you're saying of, yeah, how do people get their information now? It's by sharing it online on social media.

Speaker 1 I think that that's just increasingly true. And my view at this point is like, all right, like we started off focused on free expression.
We kind of had this pressure tested over the last period.

Speaker 1 I feel like I... just have a much greater command now of what I think the policies should be.
And like, this is how it's going to be going forward. And

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 at this point,

Speaker 1 I think a lot of people look at this as a purely political thing.

Speaker 1 Because they kind of look at the timing and they're like, hey, well, you're doing this right after the election.

Speaker 1 It's like, okay, I try not to change our content rules right in the middle of an election either.

Speaker 1 There's not a great time to do this. Right.

Speaker 2 And you want to do it a year later.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like there's no good time to do it.

Speaker 1 At whatever time is going on, there's going to be, you know, so

Speaker 1 the good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this kind of cultural pulse as like, okay, where are people right now? And how are people thinking about it?

Speaker 1 We try to have policies that reflect

Speaker 1 mainstream discourse.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 yeah, I mean, I don't know. This is something I've been thinking about for a while.

Speaker 1 I think that this is going to be pretty durable because at this point, we've just been pressure tested on this stuff for like the last eight to ten years with like these huge institutions just pressuring us.

Speaker 1 And I feel like this is kind of the right place to be going forward.

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Like, first of all, what was the premise?

Speaker 2 Like, what would they, were they saying was your offense? Was it that you were allowing information that was not true that was getting out there?

Speaker 2 I know there was also, they're saying that you guys were allowing hate groups to speak. There was a lot of this.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 the tough thing with politics is that there's like,

Speaker 1 well, w when you say who who someone's coming after you, are you referring to kind of the government and investigations and all that? I mean, so the the the issue is that there's the

Speaker 1 there's what specific thing an agency might be looking into you for,

Speaker 1 and then there's like the underlying political motivation, which is like, why do the people who are running this thing hate you? And I think that those can often be two very different things.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, we had organizations that were looking into us that were like not really involved with social media. Like I think like the CFPB, like this financial, I don't even know what it stands for.

Speaker 1 It's the financial organization

Speaker 1 that Elizabeth Ward had set up. Oh, great.
And it's basically, it's like, we're not a bank. The debanking.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, so

Speaker 1 we're not a bank, right? It's like, like, what does Meta have to do with this? But they kind of found some theory that they wanted to investigate.

Speaker 1 And it's like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard, right, to like

Speaker 1 some theory. But it, like, I don't know.
It just, it kind of, like, throughout

Speaker 1 the party and the government, there was just sort of, I don't know if it's, I don't know how this stuff works. I mean, I've never been in government.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it's like a directive or it's just like a quiet consensus that like, we don't like these guys. They're not doing what we want.
We're going to punish them. But

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 tough to be at the other end of that.

Speaker 2 What was it like?

Speaker 1 Well, it's not good. I think

Speaker 1 the thing that I think is actually the toughest, though, is

Speaker 1 it's global, right? So, and really when you think about it, the US government should be defending its companies, right? Not be the tip of the spear attacking its companies.

Speaker 1 So we talk about a lot, okay, what is the experience of,

Speaker 1 okay, if the U.S. government comes after you.
I think the real issue is that when the U.S. government does that to its tech industry,

Speaker 1 it's basically just open season around the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 The EU, I pull these numbers, the EU has fined the tech companies more than $30 billion over the last, I think it was like 10 or 20 years. Holy shit.
And shit.

Speaker 1 So when you think about it, like, okay, there's, it's like, you know, $100 million here, a couple billion dollars there.

Speaker 1 But what I think really adds up to is this is sort of like a kind of EU-wide policy for how they want to deal with American tech. It's almost like a tariff.
And I think the U.S.

Speaker 1 government basically gets to decide how are they going to deal with that, right? Because if the U.S. government,

Speaker 1 if some other

Speaker 1 country was screwing with another industry that we cared about, the U.S. government would probably find some way to put pressure on them.

Speaker 1 But I think what happened here is actually the complete opposite. The U.S.

Speaker 1 government led the the kind of attack against the companies, which then just made it so like the EU is basically and all these other places just free to just go to town on all the American companies and do whatever you want.

Speaker 1 But I mean, look, obviously, like I don't want to come across as if like we don't have things that we need to do better. Obviously, we do.

Speaker 1 And when we mess something up, we deserve to be held accountable for that. And

Speaker 1 just like everyone else,

Speaker 1 I do think that the American technology industry is a bright spot in the American economy.

Speaker 1 I think it's a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world. And I think it should be part of the U.S.'s strategy going forward to defend that.

Speaker 1 And it's one of the things that I'm optimistic about with President Trump is

Speaker 1 I think he just wants America to win. And

Speaker 1 I think some of the stuff, like

Speaker 1 the other governments who are kind of pushing on this stuff, it's, you know, it's like at least the U.S. has the rule of law, right?

Speaker 1 So the government can come after you for something, but you still get your day in court and the courts are pretty fair. And, you know, so we've basically done a pretty good job of defending ourselves.

Speaker 1 And when we've, when we've... chosen to do that, basically we have a pretty good rate of winning.

Speaker 1 It's just not like that in every other country around the world. Like if other governments decide that they're going to go after you, you don't always get kind of

Speaker 1 a clear

Speaker 1 shake at kind of defending yourself on the rules. So I think to some degree, if the U.S.
tech industry is going to continue being really strong,

Speaker 1 I do think that the U.S. government has a role

Speaker 1 in basically defending it abroad. And that's one of the things that I'm optimistic about will will happen in this administration.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, I think this administration uniquely has felt the impact of

Speaker 2 not being able to have free speech. Because

Speaker 2 this is the administration where Trump was famously kicked off of Twitter. That was a huge issue.
Like after January 6th, they removed,

Speaker 2 at the time, the sitting president. It was kind of crazy to remove that person from social media because you've decided that he incited a riot.

Speaker 2 So for him,

Speaker 2 without free speech,

Speaker 2 without podcasts, without social media, they probably wouldn't have had a chance because the mainstream narrative other than Fox News was so clearly against him.

Speaker 2 The majority of the television entities and print entities were against him, the majority of them. So if without social media, without podcast,

Speaker 2 they don't stand a chance. So they're uniquely aware of the importance of giving people their voice, free speech.

Speaker 2 But you do have to be careful about misinformation, and you do have to be careful about just outright lies and propaganda complaints, or propaganda campaigns, rather. And how do you differentiate?

Speaker 1 Well, I think that there are a couple of different things here. One is this is something where I think X and Twitter just did it better than us on fact-checking.

Speaker 1 We took the critique around fact-checking, sorry, around misinformation. We put in place this fact-checking program, which basically empowered these third-party fact-checkers.

Speaker 1 They could mark stuff false, and then we would downright it in the algorithm. I think what

Speaker 1 Twitter and X have done with community notes, I think is just a better program.

Speaker 1 Rather than having a small number of fact-checkers, you get the whole community to weigh in.

Speaker 1 When people usually disagree on something tend to agree on how they're voting on a note, that's a good sign to the community that this is, there's actually like a broad consensus on this, and then you show it.

Speaker 1 And you're showing more information, not less, right? So you're not using the fact check as a signal to show less.

Speaker 1 You're using the community note to provide real context and show additional information. So I think that that's better.

Speaker 1 For

Speaker 1 when you're talking about like nation states or people interfering, a lot of that stuff is best rooted out at the level of kind of accounts doing phony things.

Speaker 1 So you get like, whether it's like China or Russia or Iran or like one of of these countries, they'll set up these networks of fake accounts and bots and they coordinate and they post on each other's stuff to make it seem like it's authentic and kind of convince people.

Speaker 1 It's like, wow, a bunch of people must think this or something.

Speaker 1 And the way that you identify that is you build AI systems that can basically detect that those accounts are not behaving the way that a human would.

Speaker 1 And when we find that, that there's like some bot that's operating an account.

Speaker 2 How do you differentiate? How do you figure that out?

Speaker 1 It just, I mean, there are some things that a person just would never do. Right.

Speaker 2 So, um, have you met Lex Friedman?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He might not be. Well, but is he gonna take past your team? But is he gonna take

Speaker 1 a is he gonna make a million actions in a minute? It's like, yeah, yeah, probably not. Okay, so it's that.
Well, I mean, it's things that aren't more subtle than that.

Speaker 1 I think like these guys are pretty sophisticated and it's an adversarial space. So

Speaker 1 we find some technique and then they

Speaker 1 they basically kind of update their techniques.

Speaker 1 But we have a team of, it's effectively like intelligence, counterintelligence folks, counter-terrorism folks, AI folks who are building systems to identify what are these accounts that are just not behaving the way that people would and how are they interacting.

Speaker 1 And then sometimes you trace it down and

Speaker 1 sometimes you get some tips from different intelligence agencies and then you can kind of piece together over time.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, this network of people is actually some kind of fake cluster of accounts, and that's against our policies, and we just take them all off.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 how are you sure?

Speaker 2 Is there a 100% certainty

Speaker 2 that you are definitely getting a group of people that are bad actors? Or is it just people that have unpopular opinions?

Speaker 1 No, I don't think it's that for this. I think.

Speaker 2 But what I'm saying is, how do you determine?

Speaker 2 At what what percentage of accuracy are you determining it? Do you ever accidentally think that people that are going to get moderated are actually just real people?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 I think for the specific problem around these large coordinated groups doing kind of like election interference or something, it's a large enough group. We have like a bunch of people analyzing it.

Speaker 1 It's like they study it for a while. I think we're probably pretty accurate on that.

Speaker 1 But I actually think one of the bigger issues that we have in our moderation system is this precision issue that you're talking about.

Speaker 1 And that is actually, of all the things that we announced this week, in terms of how we're going to update the content policies, changing the content filters to have to require higher confidence and precision is actually going to be the thing that reduces the vast majority of the censorship mistakes that we make.

Speaker 1 The removing the fact checkers and replacing them with community notes, I think it's a good step forward.

Speaker 1 Like a very small percent of content is fact-checked in the first place, so it's, is that going to make the hugest difference? I'm not sure. I think it'll be a positive step, though.

Speaker 1 And we like opened up some content policies. So some stuff that was restricted before, we opened up.
Okay, that's good. It'll mean that some set of things that might have been censored before or not.

Speaker 1 But by far the biggest set of issues we have, and you and I have talked about a bunch of issues like this over the years, is like, it's just, okay, you have some classifier that's, it's trying to find, say, like drug content, right?

Speaker 1 People decide, okay, it's like the opioid epidemic is a big deal. We need to do a better job of cracking down on drugs and drug sales, right? I don't want people dealing drugs on our networks.

Speaker 1 So we build a bunch of systems that basically go out and try to automate finding people

Speaker 1 who are

Speaker 1 dealing drugs. And then you basically have this question, which is how precise do you want to set the classifier?

Speaker 1 So do you want to make it so that the system needs to be 99% sure that someone is dealing drugs before taking them down? Do you want it to be 90% confident, 80% confident?

Speaker 1 And then those correspond to amounts of,

Speaker 1 you know, I guess the statistics term would be recall. What percent of the bad stuff are you finding? So if you require 99% confidence, then

Speaker 1 maybe you only actually end up taking down 20% of the bad content.

Speaker 1 Whereas if you reduce it and you say, okay, we're only going to require 90% confidence, now maybe you can take down 60% of the bad content.

Speaker 1 But let's say you say, no, we really need to find everyone who's doing this bad thing. And it doesn't need to be as severe as dealing drugs.
It could just be,

Speaker 1 I mean, it could be any kind of content of, any kind of category of harmful content.

Speaker 1 You start getting to some of these classifiers might have 80, 85% precision in order to get 90% of the bad stuff down.

Speaker 1 But the problem is if you're at 90% precision, that means one out of 10 things that the classifier takes down is not actually problematic.

Speaker 1 And if you filter, if you kind of multiply that across the billions of people who use our services every day, that is

Speaker 1 millions and millions of posts that are basically being taken down that are innocent.

Speaker 1 And upon review, we're going to look at and be like, this is ridiculous that this thing got taken down, which I mean, I think you've had that experience and we've talked about this for a bunch of stuff over time.

Speaker 1 But it really just comes down to this question of where do you want to set the classifiers. So one of the things that we're going to do is basically set them to be

Speaker 1 to be require more confidence, which is this trade-off.

Speaker 1 It's going to mean that we will maybe take down a smaller amount of the harmful content, but it will also mean that we'll dramatically reduce the amount of people whose accounts we're taking off

Speaker 1 for a mistake, which is just a terrible experience, right? It's like, okay, you're going about your day, and then one day you wake up and you're like, oh, my WhatsApp account just got

Speaker 1 deactivated because it's connected to a Facebook account and the Facebook account

Speaker 1 is,

Speaker 1 or like I'm using on the same phone as a Facebook account where

Speaker 1 like we made some enforcement mistake and thought you were doing something bad that you weren't because our classifiers were set to too low of precision. Has that happened before?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Where their WhatsApp app got canceled as well?

Speaker 1 Yeah, because I mean,

Speaker 1 there are a lot of people.

Speaker 2 So if your Facebook app gets taken out, like say if you have a Facebook and you have like a sock puppet account, and the sock puppet account, you post offensive memes and you're generally gross. Yeah.

Speaker 2 If you get caught for that, does your WhatsApp get killed?

Speaker 1 Not for memes, but go back to like a very severe thing. Like let's say someone is terrorist.

Speaker 2 Let's say the most severe.

Speaker 1 Sure, yeah. Let's say someone is like terrorist content and they're planning some attack.
Okay. So we take down their account, right?

Speaker 1 But then let's say that person can just go then sign up with another account.

Speaker 2 How does WhatsApp get connected to that though?

Speaker 1 Oh, well, if it's, I mean, we run these different services and if they're on the same phone, it's basically, you know, it's one thing that, you know, it's basically regulators or governments will come to us and say, okay,

Speaker 1 it's...

Speaker 1 You're clearly not doing enough if you kick someone off for terrorism and then they can just like sign up for another account on the phone. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 1 You're also, they also think, okay, well, we're not doing enough if we deactivate their Facebook account because they're like planning a terrorist attack, but we let them use all our other services.

Speaker 2 Right. Right.
So you're aware.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So if we, if our systems think that someone is a terrorist, then you probably need to deactivate their access to all the different accounts.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they can't get on threads.

Speaker 1 It's just not. Threads, Instagram.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that makes sense. So it's, you can understand how you get there, but then you just get to this question around the precision and the confidence level.

Speaker 1 And then you're just making all these mistakes at scale, and it's just unacceptable.

Speaker 1 But I think it's a very hard calculation of like where do you want to be because on the one hand, like I get why people kind of come to us and they're like, no, you need to do a better job finding more of the terrorism or the drugs and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 But over time, the technology will get better and it'll get more precise.

Speaker 1 But at any given point in time, that's the choice that we have to make is do we want to make more mistakes erring on the side of just like blowing away innocent people's accounts?

Speaker 1 Or do we want to get

Speaker 1 a somewhat higher percent of the bad stuff off? And I think that there's just some balance that you need to strike on this.

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Speaker 2 Conversation yesterday, Mel Gibson and I, about how that can get weird. Was it Theo? It might have been Theo.
I think it was Theo.

Speaker 2 Where that can get weird because I think like if you're a person and you work at some accounting firm, but you like posting about stuff, but you don't want it to come back and reflect on your life.

Speaker 2 You want to shit post, you want to post jokes, you want want to be silly. You should be able to be anonymous.
I think there's nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 2 I don't think just because you state your opinion, people should be able to search where you sleep. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Speaker 2 But if you're going to allow anonymous accounts, you are definitely going to open up the door to bad actors having enormous blocks of accounts where they can use either AI or just programs where they have like specific answers.

Speaker 2 I'm sure you've seen that before. It's come up on on Twitter multiple times where they found hundreds of sock puppet accounts tweeting the exact same thing.

Speaker 2 So you've literally word for word, even certain words in caps, like either keep people copy or pasting it, or there's an email campaign that's getting legitimate people to do it, or these are fake people.

Speaker 2 You're going to have, if you're going to have anonymous accounts, which I think you should, because I think whistleblowers, I think the benefits of anonymous reporting on

Speaker 2 important things that the general public needs to know about, especially whistleblower type stuff, you have to have some ability to be anonymous.

Speaker 2 But if you're going to do that, you're also going to have the possibility that these aren't real people, that these are paid actors, these are paid people, or not people at all, or they're running programs, and they're doing this to try to sway public opinion about very important issues.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 A lot of what we've seen too, I mean, so there's the anonymous accounts.

Speaker 1 Also, just over time, I think a lot of the kind of more interesting conversations have shifted from the public sphere to more private ones. So WhatsApp groups,

Speaker 1 private groups on Facebook.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you have this experience where maybe 10 years ago you would have posted your kind of quick takes on whatever social media you were using.

Speaker 1 Now, you know, the stuff that I post on Facebook and Instagram, it's like I put time into making sure that that's kind of good content that I want to be seen broadly.

Speaker 1 And then like most of the jokes that I make are like with my friends and WhatsApp,

Speaker 1 In groups.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I think that's sort of

Speaker 1 where the world is more broadly now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. No, I think so for jokes, for that kind of stuff, for comedians for sure.
Because also, we'll say things that we don't really mean. We just say it because it's a funny thing to say.

Speaker 2 I think everyone does.

Speaker 1 For sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Which is just a weird thing about taking things out of context, particularly on social media where people love to do that. But

Speaker 2 there is this problem of like, let's let's just say that you're a country that's involved in some sort of an international conflict and you have this ability to get out this fake narrative and just spread it widely about all sorts of things you're accusing this other government of, all sorts of things that aren't true.

Speaker 2 And it just muddies the water of reality for a lot of people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that's why that side of things, the kind of governments running these broad manipulation campaigns, I mean, we're not letting off the gas on that at all. I think

Speaker 1 most categories of bad stuff that we're policing, everyone agrees is bad. No one's sitting there defending that terrorism is good, right?

Speaker 1 Or child exploitation or drugs or IP violations or people inciting violence.

Speaker 1 Most of the stuff is bad. People clearly believe that

Speaker 1 election interference and foreign government manipulation of content is bad.

Speaker 1 So we have, this is the type of stuff that the vast majority of our energy goes towards that, and we're not changing our approach on any of that.

Speaker 1 The two categories that I think have been very politicized are misinformation, because who gets to judge or what's false and what's true?

Speaker 1 You may just not like my opinion on something, and then people think it's false, but it's,

Speaker 1 but I think that that one's really tricky. And the other one is

Speaker 1 basically what, you know, what people refer to as hate speech, which is, I think, also comes from a good place of, you know, wanting to crack down on that, of

Speaker 1 wanting to promote more inclusion and belonging and people feeling

Speaker 1 feeling good and like having a pluralistic society that can

Speaker 1 that can basically have all these different communities coexist.

Speaker 2 Accept everyone.

Speaker 1 But I think the problem is that, you know, you just, all these things are on a spectrum and when you go too far on them,

Speaker 1 you know, I think on that side, we just basically got to this point where there were these things that you just couldn't say, which were mainstream discourse.

Speaker 1 So it's like Pete Hegseth is going to

Speaker 1 probably be defending his nomination for Secretary of Defense on the Senate floor.

Speaker 1 And I think one of the points that he's made is that he thinks that women shouldn't be able to be in certain combat roles.

Speaker 1 And until we updated our policies, that wouldn't have been a thing that you could have said on our platforms because it would call for the exclusion of a protected category of people.

Speaker 1 And so, and it's like, okay, like on its on its face, yeah, calling for the exclusion of a protected category, that seems that like that's, okay, there's like legal protections, there's all this stuff, but okay, if it's like okay to say on the floor of Congress, you should probably be able to debate it on social media.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I think some of the stuff I think well-intentioned

Speaker 1 went too far, needs to just get rationalized a bit. But it's those two categories, misinformation and hate speech, I think are the ones that got politicized.

Speaker 1 All the other ones, which is the vast majority of the stuff that we do, is I think people generally agree that it's good and we need to go after it.

Speaker 1 But then you just get into this problem of the mistakes, like you're talking about. Okay, well, what confidence level do people want us to have in our enforcement?

Speaker 1 And at what point would people rather us kind of say, okay, I'm not sure that

Speaker 1 that one is causing an issue.

Speaker 1 So on balance, maybe we should just, you know, leave that person's account up because the pain of just nuking someone's account when you're not not sure or you make a mistake is like that's pretty real too.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Very, very complicated. Yeah.
It's it's all very nuanced.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you made a point earlier about the the government supporting its companies, that it would be a good thing for the government to support its companies. It makes sense.

Speaker 2 It's an American company. I think the issue that we're dealing with is companies as we're describing them have never existed before, right? There's never been a thing like Facebook before.

Speaker 2 There's never been a thing like Twitter before or X. There's never been a thing like Instagram.

Speaker 2 These are new things in terms of the impact that it has on society, on opinions, on conversations, on distribution of information.

Speaker 2 There's never been a thing like this that the government didn't control.

Speaker 2 So it makes sense from their perspective continuing the patterns of behavior that they've always exhibited, which is to have control over the media.

Speaker 2 I mean, there has been CIA operatives that have been in major newspapers forever. There's always been that.

Speaker 2 There's always been this sort of input that the government had in mainstream media narratives. They are in a position now where they're losing that.

Speaker 2 They've essentially lost it, and especially with this last, the push during COVID deteriorated, as you were saying before, the opinion and the respect that people have for the facts that are coming from mainstream journalism in a way that I've never seen before in my life, where an enormous percentage of the population does not trust mainstream media anymore.

Speaker 2 So, well, what do they trust? They trust social media. Well, who's running that? Well, a bunch of people have figured it out and invented it.
Well, now fuck that.

Speaker 2 Like, we've got to crack down on that.

Speaker 2 Like, we've got to get our hands on this, which is what we saw during COVID, which is what we saw during the Biden administration's attempt to remove the Hunter Biden laptop story from Twitter and from all these different things that we saw happen, the way they contacted you guys, what they're trying to do with getting you to remove real information about vaccine side effects, like that.

Speaker 2 This is like this new

Speaker 2 attempt to crack down on this new thing, which is a distribution outlet that's far more successful than anything they've ever controlled before. And they have no control of it, right?

Speaker 2 They had CBS, they had NBC, when they had the New York Times and all these Washington Posts, when they were in control of narratives in that way, it was so much easier.

Speaker 2 There wasn't some sort of pirate radio voice that came on and said, hey, guys, look, here's the latest studies that shows this is not true. Here's why they're lying about that.

Speaker 2 Here's why they're lying about this. And now that's what you get all day long on X.
It's all day long is like dissolving illusions.

Speaker 2 And that's a completely new thing that probably led to Trump getting elected.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the causality there is tricky, but because there's a lot of things. Yeah, there's a lot of things.

Speaker 2 But without it, he probably doesn't get elected.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's tough to know. I mean, I do come back to this point that every major incumbent lost their elections around the world.

Speaker 2 But I think that's also a good thing.

Speaker 1 It might be because of that revealing how kind of

Speaker 1 incorrect and dishonest I think some of these governments were. Yeah.
Yeah. So I think that's that's quite possible.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I do think that there is this cycle that goes on where, you know, within a society, it's not just the government that has power.

Speaker 1 There's like certain people who are in these like culturally elite positions. And, you know, journalists,

Speaker 1 TV news anchors, like who are the people who people broadly trust? Right. They're not all in government.
They're like

Speaker 1 a lot of people in other positions. It's like, who are the people that basically people look to?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think that's basically, it needs to shift for the internet age. And I think a lot of the people who

Speaker 1 people look to before, they're kind of realizing, hey, they weren't super honest about a lot of these issues that we face. And I think that that's partially why social media isn't a monolithic thing.

Speaker 1 It's not that people trust... Facebook or X.
They trust the creators and the voices that they feel like are being authentic and giving them valuable information on there.

Speaker 1 So there's, I think, going to be just this whole new class of creators who basically become the new kind of cultural elites that people look at and are like, okay, these are the people who give it to me straight.

Speaker 1 And I think that that's a thing that is maybe it's possible because of social media.

Speaker 1 I think it's also just the internet more broadly. I mean, I think podcasting is obviously a huge and important part of that too.

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't know to what extent you feel like you kind of got to be large because of social media or just it's or just the podcasting platforms that you used but um but i think that this is like a very big sea change in terms of like who are the voices that matter and you know what we do is we we try to build a platform that gives people a voice but i think that there's this wholesale

Speaker 1 generational shift in who are the people who are being listened to and i think that that's like a very fascinating thing that is going on because i i think that that's like what is what's going on here it's not it's it's not just the government um and people saying hey we we want a very big change here.

Speaker 1 I think it's just a wholesale shift and saying, we just want different people who we actually trust,

Speaker 1 who are actually going to tell us the truth

Speaker 1 and not give us the bullshit opinions that you're supposed to say, but the type of stuff that I would actually, like when I'm sitting in my living room with my friends, like the stuff that we know is true.

Speaker 1 Who are the people who kind of have the courage to actually just say that stuff?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I think that that whole like cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The problem is these

Speaker 2 people that are starting these jobs, they're coming out of universities. And in the universities, they're indoctrinated into these ideas as well.

Speaker 2 It's very difficult to be a person who stands outside of that and takes unpopular positions. You get socially ostracized.
And people are very...

Speaker 2 They're very hesitant to do that. And they would rather just keep their mouth shut and talk about it in quiet conversation.
And that's what we experience, which is another

Speaker 2 argument for anonymous accounts. I think you should have anonymous accounts.

Speaker 2 I think you should be able, like if there's something like COVID mandates or some things that you're dealing with and you don't want to get fired because of it, you should be able to talk about it.

Speaker 2 And you should be able to post facts and information and what you've learned.

Speaker 2 And, you know, anecdotal experiences of people in your family that had vaccine side effects and not worry about losing your job, which people were worried about, which is so crazy.

Speaker 2 And, you know, and you're seeing

Speaker 2 a lot of the people that used to be in mainstream media got fired, and now they're trying to do the sort of podcast thing, but they're trying to do it like a mainstream media person.

Speaker 2 So they're like gaslighting during podcasts, and people are like, hey, fuckface, like this, you can't do that here. It doesn't work.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, it's a new medium. I mean, I'm sure you know the history on this.

Speaker 1 It's like when people transitioned from radio to TV, the initial TV anchors were the same radio people, but just like being filmed while speaking on the radio.

Speaker 1 But it turned out it actually was a completely different type of person that you need because on your radio is just like your voice and your cadence and all that.

Speaker 1 It's like, you know, the whole phrase, it's like, you've got a good radio voice, right? It's like,

Speaker 1 okay, on TV, you need to be telegenic, right? You need to kind of have charisma in that medium. It's like a completely different thing.
And

Speaker 1 I think that that's going to be true for the internet too. It's, you know, it's not as cut, right? I think part of it is the format, right? The fact that you do these like two three hour episodes.

Speaker 1 I mean

Speaker 1 I hated doing TV because you know, I basically got started

Speaker 1 I started Facebook when I was 19 and I was good at some things very bad at others.

Speaker 1 I was good at coding and like real bad at at kind of like talking to people and explaining what I was doing and I just like had these experiences early on where I'd go on TV and like it wouldn't go well and they'd like cut to they'd cut it to some down to some random sound bite and I'd like look stupid and then like and then basically like I'd get super nervous about about like going on TV because I knew that they were just gonna cut it in some way that I was gonna look like a fucking idiot and like and so I'm just like this sucks right

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 so I just like it's kind of a funny thing about like it's like in some ways it's like okay at the same time I was you know gaining confidence being able to like build more and more complicated products and it's like, even as an early 20s person, I was like, I could do this.

Speaker 1 And then on the kind of TV and comms public side, I was like, this is a disaster. Every time I go out, it's worse and worse and worse.
And it just gets, but,

Speaker 1 but I mean, it's, it's one of the reasons why I think on the internet, like there's no reason to cut it to a four-minute soundbite conversation.

Speaker 1 It's like, I think part of what makes it authentic is like, we can just, I mean, these are complex issues. We can unpack it for hours and probably still have hours more stuff to talk about.

Speaker 1 It just, it's, I don't know. I think it's just more real.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's definitely that.

Speaker 2 And the other thing about television that's always going to hold it back is the fact that every conversation gets interrupted every X amount of minutes because you have to cut to a commercial.

Speaker 2 So you really can't get into depth. Even Bill Maher show is only an hour.
You know, you have all these people talking over each other, and then you sit down with one person for a short amount of time.

Speaker 2 It's just not enough time for important subjects. It's also a lot of them, for whatever reason, want to do it in front of an audience, which is the worst way to get people to talk.

Speaker 2 Like when you imagine these disasters that you had if there was like 5,000 people staring at you in a TV crowd as well.

Speaker 2 So there's that added element, which is so not normal and not conducive to having a conversation where you're talking about nuanced things.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Where you have to like think. You have to be able to pause and not concern yourself with being entertaining in front of these fucking people just sitting there staring at you.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And also like when you're having a conversation, like, i don't know it's like when you start talking about something your kind of subconscious kicks in you start thinking about the the topic so it's like you might not actually have the thing that you want to say until like five minutes later right and right i mean it's like when we started this conversation i think like the first few minutes were just kind of slow it's like warming up like i'm like okay kind of like downloading into my memory like how how am i gonna like you know it's like how am i gonna you know just explain these different things but it's um

Speaker 1 yeah no i just think that that that's sort of how people work What's also like it's conversations are like a dance, you know.

Speaker 2 One person can't be dancing at another speed, and the other person's going slow.

Speaker 2 Like, you kind of have to find the rhythm that you're going to talk with, and then you have to actually be interested in what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 That's another thing that they are at a huge disadvantage of in mainstream media. It's like they're just doing that because that's their job.

Speaker 2 They probably don't even know a lot about climate change, they probably don't really understand too much about what

Speaker 2 SpaceX is trying to accomplish, but they're just reporting on it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's

Speaker 1 a lot of the people I've met there, I think, are good people.

Speaker 1 It's just a tough format. It's a terrible format.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the problem is they get locked into that format and no one trusts them. And then they leave and they go, yeah, but you were just lying to us about this, that, and the other thing.

Speaker 2 And now I'm supposed to believe you're one of the good guys. You're one of the straight shooters now.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, getting back to the original point, this is why I think, you know, it makes sense to me that the government didn't want you to succeed and to have the sort of unchecked power that they perceived social media to

Speaker 1 have.

Speaker 2 And I think one of the benefits that we have now of the Trump administration is that they have clearly felt the repercussions of a limited amount of free speech, of free speech limitations, censorship, government overreach.

Speaker 2 If anybody saw it, look,

Speaker 2 I don't know what the actual impact of the Hunter Biden laptop story would have been. I don't know.

Speaker 2 But there's many people that think it probably amounted to millions of votes overall in the country of people that were on the fence, the people that weren't sure who they're going to vote for.

Speaker 2 If they found out the Hunter Biden laptop was real, they're like, oh, this is fucking, the family's fucking crazy. And they would have voted for Trump.
That's possibly real.

Speaker 2 And if that's possibly real, that could be defined as election interference. And all that stuff scares the shit out of me.
That kind of stuff scares the shit out of me.

Speaker 2 When the government gets involved in what could be termed election interference, but through some weird loophole, it's legal. Whereas some

Speaker 1 I don't think that the pushing for social media companies to censor stuff was legal. I mean, it's like that's...
I mean, there's all this stuff about what,

Speaker 1 like, people talk about the First Amendment and, okay, these, these... tech platforms should should offer free speech like the First Amendment.

Speaker 1 That, I think, is a philosophical principle. The First Amendment doesn't apply to companies in our content moderation.
It's more of an American ethos about how we think that

Speaker 1 best dialogue is carried out. But the First Amendment does apply to the government.
That's like the whole point, right? Is the government is not allowed to censor this stuff.

Speaker 1 So at some level, I do think that

Speaker 1 having people in the administration calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don't take down things that are true is like

Speaker 2 it's pretty bad it sounds illegal pretty bad i'd love to hear it i wish somebody recorded those conversations well i mean

Speaker 2 i mean again it's well

Speaker 2 somebody could animate them maybe polytunes the uh

Speaker 1 a lot of the material is is public i mean it's uh i mean jim jordan led this whole investigation in the yeah in congress i mean it was basically i think about this as like

Speaker 1 you know what elon did on the twitter files when he took over that company i think jim jordan basically did that for the rest of the industry with the congressional investigation that he did.

Speaker 1 And we just turned over all of the documents and everything that we had

Speaker 1 to them, and they basically put together this report.

Speaker 2 And the people that actually did call for censorship, what was their response to all this?

Speaker 1 To what?

Speaker 1 To the investigation? Yes.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Was anybody held accountable? Was there any

Speaker 1 repercussions? I mean, they lost the election. Yes.
So that's it. I mean, that's it.
Well, in a democracy, I mean, that's kind of... Right.

Speaker 2 Right. But if what they did was illegal, do you not think that some steps should be put in place to make sure that people are punished for that and that that never happens again?

Speaker 2 It seems that that has a massive impact on the way our country goes. If that's election interference, and I think it is, that has a massive impact on the direction of our country.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, the COVID thing, I don't think, was election interference as much as it was just

Speaker 1 government meddling where it shouldn't have. But yeah, no, I mean, it's not.
No, I'm talking about the $100 million. It's not for me to say

Speaker 1 what specific

Speaker 1 retribution or justice should happen to anyone who is involved in these things. But I think your point about...

Speaker 1 Let's make sure this doesn't happen again

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 the one that I'm more focused on. Right? Because it's the thing that I reflect on on my journey on all this, which is like,

Speaker 1 okay,

Speaker 1 yeah, so we didn't take down the stuff that was true, but

Speaker 1 we did generally defer to the government on some of these policies that in retrospect I probably wouldn't knowing what I know now. And

Speaker 1 I just think that that's sort of the journey that we've been on is like, okay, we start the thing focused on free expression, go through some like pretty crazy times in the world, get it pressure tested, see where we basically ended up doing stuff that led to a slippery slope that we weren't happy with the conclusion, and like try to reset.

Speaker 1 And that's sort of the moment that we're at now is trying to just rationalize

Speaker 1 a bunch of the policies.

Speaker 1 And look, I mean, obviously, crazy things can happen in the future that might unearth something that I haven't, you know, some kind of angle on this that I haven't thought enough about yet.

Speaker 1 So, I don't know, I'm sure I'm not done making mistakes in the world.

Speaker 1 But I think at this point, we have a much more thorough understanding of what the space is.

Speaker 1 And I think our kind of values and principles on this are likely going to be much more durable going forward.

Speaker 1 And I think that that's probably a good thing for the internet.

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Speaker 2 Terms apply. Thing for the internet.
I was very happy with your announcement. I'm very happy that you took those steps.
I'm very happy you brought Dana White aboard.

Speaker 1 Oh, he's awesome. I've been talking to him for a while about that.
I mean, he's like, talk about like an amazing entrepreneur. Right.
It's like, I just want, like, because I control our company,

Speaker 1 I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me. Right.
It's like a normal corporate environment.

Speaker 1 It's like basically the CEO just tries to like, you know, they're just trying to convince the board to like let them have their job and pay them more.

Speaker 1 It's like, all right, the board doesn't pay me except for security. And

Speaker 1 I'm not worried about losing my job because I control the majority of the voting in the company.

Speaker 1 So I actually get to use our board to like have the smartest people who I can get to have around me help work on these problems. So it's like, all right, who are the people I want? Like.

Speaker 1 I just want like the best entrepreneurs and people who've created different things. And like, I mean, Dana is like this guy who, I mean, he basically took the sport from being this, like,

Speaker 1 I think it was viewed as like this pretty marginal thing when he got started, right? I think John McCain was trying to outlaw it. And,

Speaker 1 you know, now it's like, I think it and F1 are the two fastest-growing sports in the world. It's got hundreds of millions of people viewing it.

Speaker 1 It's like, I mean, what Dana's done with the UFC is like one of the most legendary business stories. And

Speaker 1 the brand is beloved. And I think he's just,

Speaker 1 so he's like a world-class entrepreneur. And he's just like a, he's got a strong backbone.

Speaker 1 And I think part of what the conversation that I had with him around joining our board was, okay, like we have a lot of governments and folks around the world putting a lot of pressure on our company.

Speaker 1 And like we need some like strong people who are going to basically

Speaker 1 help advise us on how to handle some of these situations.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, that's, but, but yeah, I mean, this is, running this company is not for the faint of heart.

Speaker 1 I mean, you definitely, there's definitely a lot of pressure from like all these different governments. And then it's like, okay, I could spend all my time doing that, but I'm not even a politician.

Speaker 1 Like, I want to, I just want to spend my time building things, right? So, so it's um, so yeah, I think Dana's gonna be great. He's the best, great entrepreneur.

Speaker 2 I agree with everything you said about him. Without him, none of the UFC would have ever taken place the way it did.

Speaker 2 I mean, you needed the Fertida brothers, they had to come in with all the money and the vision. And it's really funny because Eddie Bravo and I, you know, we've been fans for so long.

Speaker 2 Eddie Bravo and I went to a live event in the 90s. I was working for the UFC as a backstage interviewer, and he went there with Ricky Rocket.
You know Ricky Rockett from Poison? No.

Speaker 2 He's a fucking black belt under the Machados. He's legit.
Super legit. Really nice guy, too.
Anyway, so.

Speaker 2 Ricky Rocket and him were at the UFC, and we were talking about it in the 90s. We're like, you know what this sport needs? Because we were in love with it.

Speaker 2 But we were martial artists. We were like, the sport needs some billionaires who just throw a ton of money at it and just get it huge.

Speaker 2 And then the Fegeta brothers come along, billionaires with a ton of money who are huge fans of the sport.

Speaker 1 Just love the sport.

Speaker 2 You know, we're hiring people like Frank Shamrock to come in and train them and work out. And we're taking jiu-jitsu with John Lewis.
And they were really getting into it.

Speaker 2 And so then they buy the UFC for like $2 million, which is... probably the greatest purchase ever, except they were $40 plus million dollars in the hole when they financed the Ultimate Fighter.

Speaker 2 And then that was 2005. And then this one fight takes place with Stefan Botter and Forrest Griffin on television.
It's so wild and so crazy that millions of people start tuning in. The sport's born.

Speaker 2 Then you have Chuck Liddell, who was the champion at the time, who was the most fan-friendly champion you could ever have.

Speaker 2 Just a fucking berserker with just a psychopath with a fucking head tattoo and a mohawk crushing people in his prime.

Speaker 2 He was the perfect poster guy for the UFC because he was just smashing people and then throwing his arms back

Speaker 2 in a cage. It was nuts.
I'm sure you've seen a lot of Chuck Widow fights, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It was just the whole thing took off. But without Dana, it would have never taken place.
The guy's tireless. That man, I could call him up.

Speaker 2 I'll call him up at like two o'clock in the morning sometime. Like there's some fight going on.
And I'll say, hey, this is going on next weekend. I'm so fucking pumped.

Speaker 1 And we'll talk for hours, for hours.

Speaker 2 He just wants to talk about fights. He's like so locked in, like all the time, you know, and he's just like so driven.

Speaker 2 And now that he's healthy, like, oh my God, he's got what Gary Breck has done for him is incredible. He lost all this weight, got super thin, real fit, super healthy.

Speaker 2 He doesn't fuck around with alcohol anymore. He just eats healthy food.
He looks great. Now he's got even more energy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's incredible.
Well, we're lucky to have some of it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we are. And you know what? We're also lucky that you got into jiu-jitsu because

Speaker 2 I think that had an effect on you. You look different.
When you walked in here today, you look thicker. You look like a different guy.
You do. You look like a jiu-jitsu guy now.
It's funny.

Speaker 2 I saw your neck. I'm like, his neck's bigger.
Your neck is bigger. Good.
Are you using iron neck or is it just for training?

Speaker 1 I do like iron neck.

Speaker 1 But when I started training, not just jiu-jitsu, but striking. I was like, all right, I want to find a way to do this where I don't like hurt my brain, right?

Speaker 1 It's like, all right, like, I need to, like, I'm going to be running this company for a while. I would like to, you know, like stay, stay healthy and not take too much damage.

Speaker 1 And so I think the number one thing you need to do is, well, in addition to having good partners, is

Speaker 1 have a strong neck. Yes.
So, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, no, I take that. I take that pretty seriously.

Speaker 2 It's very important. A strong neck is great for jiu-jitsu as well because it's a weapon, like in certain positions, like heading.

Speaker 1 Heart chokes. Oh, no.
You need a neck.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a weapon. And, you know, and also for defending things and just for overall stability.
But for striking, it's very like Mike Tyson in his prime. He had a fucking 2020 neck.

Speaker 1 It's crazy. His neck is like bigger than his face.

Speaker 2 A photo of him in a suit. It's the craziest photo.
It's like his neck starts at the top of his ears and it just goes straight down when he was a champ, when he was a team.

Speaker 1 That's amazing.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The neck's very important. But it's also like, you know, you're doing it very smart.
You're bringing in Dave Camarillo.

Speaker 1 He's awesome. Amazing.
He's awesome.

Speaker 2 You're bringing in all these like super talented people to train with you too, which is really important. And just learn systematically

Speaker 2 probably the way you've learned all these other things, which is really so fascinating to me about MMA and Jiu-Jitsu in particular, is the general public has this knuckle-dragging, meadhead sort of perspective.

Speaker 2 And then I'm like, let me introduce you to Mikey Mussumichi.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, there's a range.

Speaker 2 There's a range from Mikey to right, but Mikey is one of the elite of the elite, and he is about as far from that.

Speaker 1 I love Mikey. He's a very good guy.

Speaker 2 He's a super good guy. He's super kind and

Speaker 2 unbelievably brilliant and eccentric

Speaker 2 and just so dedicated to jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 1 I'm glad that he's over at the UFC now.

Speaker 2 Yes, I am too. Well, I'm glad a guy like that exists.
I like, because I like, I'm like, okay, I know you think that. Let me show you this guy.
And then I'm like, let me show you what it really is.

Speaker 2 Let me introduce you to these people because they're the nicest people.

Speaker 2 There's no better stress reliever in the world than jiu-jitsu or martial arts. There's no better.
You leave there, you're the kindest person in the world.

Speaker 2 You just like heal all of your aggressions out of your system. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's a phenomenal stress reliever because, regardless of what you're going through day to day with Facebook and Meta and all the different projects you have going on, it's not as hard as someone trying to choke you unconscious.

Speaker 1 It's not as acute. I think it's like sometimes you have someone trying to choke you unconscious slowly over a multi-month, multi-year period, and that's business.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 But no, I think that sometimes in business, the cycle time is so long that it is very refreshing to just have a feedback loop that's like, oh, I like had my hand down, so I got punched in the face.

Speaker 1 It's like, that's like, that's,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 yeah, no, I, it's, it's really important to me for balance. I mean, I basically try to train every morning.
I'm either doing general fitness or kind of MMA.

Speaker 1 I'm sometimes grappling, sometimes striking, or sometimes both. But

Speaker 1 it got to the point where I tore my ACL training. I was probably,

Speaker 1 at that point, I didn't have,

Speaker 1 I wasn't integrated between my weight training and my fighting training. So I think I was probably overdoing it.

Speaker 1 So now we basically, I'm just trying to do this in a cohesive way, which I think will be more sustainable. But when I tore my ACL,

Speaker 1 first of all, everyone at the company was like, ah, fuck, we're going to get so many more emails now. It's like, that he can't, that he can't do this.

Speaker 1 And then, and then I sat down with Priscilla, and I expected her to be like, you're an idiot. Like, what do you expect? You're like, you know, I was in my late 30s at the time.

Speaker 1 But she was like, no, it's like, when you heal your ACL, you better go back to fighting. And I'm like, what do you, what do you mean?

Speaker 1 She's like, you are so much better to be around now that you're doing this. You have to fight.
And so that's hilarious. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, and isn't it funny that like that's completely contrary to the way most people, if they're outside of it would perceive it i mean it it definitely takes the edge off things it's like after like a couple of hours of doing that in the morning it's just like

Speaker 1 yeah it's like nothing else that day is going to stress you out that much right you can just you can just deal with it um voluntary adversity yeah yeah no it's good it's good it's also good i think to be a little bit tired like it's like it just it's i love that feeling of just like

Speaker 1 you're not like exhausted. And sometimes you get a session and you just go so hard and I need to like just go go to sleep or something.

Speaker 2 It's also good to know that you can kill people.

Speaker 2 That's a good thing to know. It's a good thing to know if something goes sideways.

Speaker 1 I guess there's a certain constant on that. It is an important skill.

Speaker 2 If you could give it in a pill, if you could sell it in a pill, everybody would buy it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 No one would say, I'd like to be the vulnerable guy walking around with a bunch of fucking assassins. No one would say that.
They would say, how much is the pill? Oh, it's $2.

Speaker 2 Oh, give me one of those pills. You take the pill.
Everybody would take that pill. Well, it exists.
It's just not a pill.

Speaker 2 It's a long journey of pain and discipline and trial and error and learning and being open-minded and being objective and understanding position and asking questions and having good training partners and absorbing information and really being diligent with your skill acquisition work, which is one of the most important and neglected parts of jiu-jitsu because training is so fun.

Speaker 2 Everybody just wants to roll, you know, where really the best way to do it is actually to drill. And it's the most boring, but really, you should drill constantly.

Speaker 2 Just jam those skills into your neurons where your brain knows exactly what to do in every position. And it's such an intellectual pursuit.

Speaker 2 And most people don't think of it that way because you have to manage your mind while you're moving your body, you're managing anxieties,

Speaker 2 you're trying to figure out when to hit the gas and when to control position and recover.

Speaker 2 There's so much going on in training that applies to virtually any stressful thing that you'll ever experience in your life. And along with it, you get this skill where you can kill people.

Speaker 2 You shouldn't kill people. Let me be clear.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying it's a good thing to kill people. I'm definitely not.
But I'm saying it's a good thing to, if someone's trying to kill you and they absolutely can't, because you could kill them easy.

Speaker 1 That's way better.

Speaker 2 It's a way better situation to be in.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it's great. I I mean, it's open a lot of

Speaker 1 how I think about stuff. I mean, it is just interesting.
Your point about having a pill that allows you to just kind of

Speaker 1 know that you have this kind of physical ability.

Speaker 2 It's a superpower.

Speaker 1 It's interesting because I do think a lot of our

Speaker 1 society has become very like...

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't even know the right word for it, but it's like it kind of like neutered or like emasculated.
And it's, there's like a whole energy in this that

Speaker 1 I think it's, it is very healthy in the right balance.

Speaker 1 And I think part of the reason

Speaker 1 one of the things that I enjoy about it is I feel like I can just like express myself, right?

Speaker 1 It's like when you're running a company, people typically don't want to see you being like this ruthless person who's like, just like, I'm just going to like crush the people I'm competing with.

Speaker 1 But when you're fighting, it's like, no, no, that's like, so I think in in some ways

Speaker 1 I think in some ways when people see me competing in this sport, they're like, oh, no, that's the real Mark.

Speaker 1 It's like, because it's, it goes back to the, all the media training stuff we were talking about when I'm going and giving my sound bites for two minutes. It's like, no, it's like, fuck that guy.

Speaker 1 It's like, that's the real one. It's, but.

Speaker 2 Well, you definitely got a lot of respect in the martial arts community.

Speaker 2 People got super excited that you were so involved in it and so interested in it because anytime someone like yourself or like Tom Hardy or anyone, they're like, wow, that guy's into it.

Speaker 1 Like, wow.

Speaker 2 Anytime something like that happens there's like some new person who's a prominent person a very smart person that's really interested in it we all get very excited because we're like oh boy it's a very welcoming community super i i think

Speaker 1 a lot of sports are like nah we don't want it's not a jock community no no super kind yeah like jiu-jitsu people in in particular they're some of the nicest people it's my friends forever you know they'll be my friends for life yeah yeah no it's it's a it's a good crew i mean when i got hurt i i really kind of missed the guys i trained trained with.

Speaker 1 It's like Davis put together this group.

Speaker 1 It's basically these, like, all these young pro fighters who are kind of like up and coming, like kind of early 20s, but they've only been doing it for a few years.

Speaker 1 So, like, I've been doing it for a few years. So, that way it's like we kind of have a more similar level of skill, and they're all better than me.

Speaker 1 But, like, but in terms of I'm like, I was in my late 30s and they're in their early 20s. It was sort of like they're kind of coming into becoming men.
I'm like sort of at the end of my fiscal peak.

Speaker 1 But it's like, it's um

Speaker 1 it's uh it's it's a really good crew. Um

Speaker 1 yeah, no, it's a good crew. And the competing thing is fun.
I can't wait to get back to that too.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's like basically, I mean, I was also doing it with, so it was basically some, a group of pro fighters and then a handful of meta executives would do it.

Speaker 1 And basically we would just kind of like fight each other and it would be fun. And

Speaker 1 then one of them decided one day that they were like, you know, I think I'm getting pretty good at jiu-jitsu. I'm gonna go to a tournament.
And I was like, all right, good luck with that, bro.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm not going to,

Speaker 1 I'm not going to go to the tournament. It's like,

Speaker 1 I don't want to go to a tournament and get embarrassed. It's like, but then the guy goes to the tournament and he does pretty well.
I'm like,

Speaker 1 that guy? It's like, it's like, okay. It's like, we go all the time.
And like,

Speaker 1 and if he's doing well in a tournament, that's like, all right, fine, sign me up, right? It's like, so I mean, it's just like super competitive. So this was like,

Speaker 1 when was this? It must have been, I don't know, I guess I rolled into this tournament

Speaker 1 and I registered under my first and middle name. So people didn't know who I was.
And I had like sunglasses and a hat and I wore a COVID mask.

Speaker 1 And like, and I, and basically was like, it wasn't until they called our names to step onto the mat that I was like, all right, take all the stuff off. And the guy was like, oh, what?

Speaker 2 That's kind of a cheat code.

Speaker 1 I mean, they kind of freak out.

Speaker 1 I think he was trying to figure out what was going on. Afterwards, his coach was like, he was like, I think that was Mark Zuckerberg who just submitted me.
And the coach is like,

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 no way. And it's like, no, I think that was.
I was like, what? You're fighting Mark Zuckerberg? He's like, get back in there. It's like, go fight him.
He's like, no, he just submitted me.

Speaker 2 That's very funny. Yeah, man.
Well, Tom Hardy's doing that too, right? He's done multiple tournaments now.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, I think,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can't wait to get back to competing. It's been sort of a slow journey on the rehab.
It's sort of like learning twice, but we're getting there. How far out are you?

Speaker 1 Oh, no, I'm done with the rehab now. Now I'm just ramping up.

Speaker 2 How far out are you from surgery?

Speaker 1 12

Speaker 1 months. 13 months.
So you did the patellatinin graft, right? I did. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's a rough one to come back from. I did the patellatinin graft on my left knee, and it took me about a year.
I did the ACL from a cadaver.

Speaker 2 It's actually, they use an Achilles tendon from a cadaver on my right knee, and I was back to jiu-jitsu in six months.

Speaker 2 Like full confidence in six months. I was

Speaker 2 100% recovered, kicking the bag, everything.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 How old were you when you got those?

Speaker 2 The first one, I was 26.

Speaker 2 The second one, I was 31, 32, somewhere around there.

Speaker 1 Oh, so so young. Yeah.
Because my doctor is basically like, look, you're at the you're like at the boundary.

Speaker 1 You could go either way, but if you want to compete again, then I'd recommend doing the patella.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know they say that. I don't agree with that.

Speaker 2 I mean, just from my own personal experience, my doctor told me that the ACL from a cadaver when they use the patella tendograft is 150% stronger than your natural ACL.

Speaker 2 He said, you'll be back to, because I didn't have any meniscus damage in my right knee. He's like, you'll be back to 100%.

Speaker 2 I have a lot of meniscus damage on my left knee, unfortunately, which is also part of the problem with the recovery of that one.

Speaker 2 But the batellite tendon graft, the bone on the kneecap was painful forever in terms of like getting on my knees, like training from my knees, doing certain positions, and even just stretching, like, you know, putting my knees on the ground, sitting on my heels, and then laying back.

Speaker 1 It was fucking painful.

Speaker 2 It took forever to break all that scar tissue up.

Speaker 1 And now it's fine it's fine now but obviously it's a long time ago yeah i can kind of do everything that i want at this point it's still like a little sore but i i i don't know i think that it's supposed to be a couple years until you like feel like it's fully i think it takes some time for the nerves to grow into it and all that did you incorporate peptides in your recovery i i didn't um

Speaker 2 do you hate healing Do I hate healing?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 Why didn't you use peptides? I don't know.

Speaker 1 I just took my doctor's advice on it.

Speaker 2 Don't do that anymore.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 2 next time, there's other people to talk to yeah yeah i mean it's it's gone pretty well it's green i'm sure it goes pretty well but it would go quicker with peptides 100 for sure but it's been this interesting this episode is brought to you by life 360.

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Speaker 1 opportunity to like

Speaker 1 like i really don't want that to happen again.

Speaker 1 So I

Speaker 1 feel like I'm so much more focused on technique. Like the first time that I learned all this stuff, I was like, I was probably like a little too brutish about it and just like muscling through stuff.

Speaker 1 And now,

Speaker 1 I don't know. Now I feel like I'm really learning how to do this stuff correctly and I can do it way more effortlessly.
So it's

Speaker 1 the goal. How did it pop?

Speaker 2 How did it pop?

Speaker 1 It was like the end of a session.

Speaker 1 And so we were two hours into training and I was doing like a few rounds and

Speaker 1 and I basically threw a leg kick and the other guy went to check it and I like leaned back to try to get around the check and just put too much torque on my knee.

Speaker 1 So it was the planted leg.

Speaker 2 Mine was a planted leg too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's I don't know. Dave was like, you know, before that round, Dave was like, you're done.
I'm like, no, one more round.

Speaker 2 I saw you too tired as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I and I and I basically and I hadn't,

Speaker 1 you know, I

Speaker 1 basically had also just done a really hard kind of like

Speaker 1 leg workout the day before. But I don't think the fight guys didn't know that.
So

Speaker 1 I really just pushed it too hard.

Speaker 2 Are you aware of Knees Over Toes Guy?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Have you done his stuff?

Speaker 1 I've looked at it a bunch. I mean, the rehab thing I took really seriously, and I thought that was pretty interesting, too.

Speaker 1 I don't want to have to do a lot of rehabs like this one, but to do one of them, I actually thought it was a a pretty interesting experience because it's like week over week, you're just getting back so much mobility and ability to do stuff.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 no, I feel like I'm,

Speaker 1 I don't know, at this point, I just like, like probably half my weight training is, is effectively kind of like rehab and joint health stuff and like wrists, shoulders, knee, all that, in addition to the big muscle groups.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's very smart.

Speaker 2 The knee over toes guy stuff is particularly effective because it all comes from a guy that had a series of pretty catastrophic knee injuries and was plagued with weak knees his whole life and then developed a bunch of different methods to strengthen all the supporting muscles around the knee that are really extraordinary.

Speaker 2 Everything from Nordic curls. Do you do those? Do you do Nordic curls?

Speaker 1 I should. I should do more than I do.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Leg curls, Nordic curls, but Nordic curls in particular because, you know, it's very difficult to do.

Speaker 2 You lift your whole body up with your hamstrings.

Speaker 2 And all these different

Speaker 2 slant board squats and different lunges and split squats and all these different things, which really strengthen up all the supporting muscles around the knee better than anything that I've ever tried before.

Speaker 2 And he's got like a whole program where it scales up and he puts it online for everybody.

Speaker 2 And he gives away a lot of information for free because he said, look, look, when I was 11 years old, I wish I had access to this. So I'm going to put it out there for everybody.

Speaker 1 Great guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Cool.

Speaker 2 But I can't recommend that stuff enough. But I think what you're doing is like strengthening shoulders, strengthening knee.
That's really the way to do it.

Speaker 2 Like you have to think of muscles in terms of like armor. You know, if you want to do this thing, you know, it's better to have good bumpers around your car if you might bump into other cars.

Speaker 2 You know, you don't want to just have raw sheet metal.

Speaker 1 You know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think a lot of people just focus on like the big movements and weight training.

Speaker 1 And it's, I don't know, first of all, for like a lot of fighting type stuff, you kind of want to be loose and like not super tight.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 1 but yeah, I mean, I just think like the joint stability stuff is you get older and want to do this for a longer period of time, it's good to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's huge. It's

Speaker 2 mobility in general. It's just like so important.

Speaker 1 You can compete in jiu-jitsu for a long time. There's like all these masters divisions and stuff.

Speaker 2 You see those old crazy looking seven-year-old dudes trying to kill each other. Yeah.
It's nuts.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 2 It is great, but for real, sincerely, we're very happy.

Speaker 2 I think I can speak, rarely do, but I think I can speak for the martial arts community. We're very happy you're bored.

Speaker 2 It makes it fun that someone is a prominent, intellectual, very intelligent person who's really gotten fascinated by it because it does help to kill that sort of knuckle-dragger perspective that a lot of people have about the sport.

Speaker 1 No, I think it's super intellectual in terms of actually breaking this stuff down. I mean, both jiu-jitsu and like striking.
I mean, yeah, you don't have time to think, but like, the

Speaker 1 reasoning behind why

Speaker 1 you kind of want to slip in certain ways and like the probability game that you're playing

Speaker 1 is,

Speaker 1 I don't know. I used to fence when I was in high school, and I did that pretty competitively.
I was never like quite good enough to be like at the Olympic level, but I was pretty good. And

Speaker 2 we virtual fenced last time you were here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there you go. And

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 you know, I just remember I would like sit in my classes in high school and like sketch out combinations of moves and sequences for how to like faint and like and and kind of trick someone to get them out of position to be able to tap them.

Speaker 1 And it's uh

Speaker 1 I feel like this is like a game in the same way, right? It's like, I mean, I think when you're training, you're not like slugging at each other that much.

Speaker 1 You're just like, you're, you know, playing tag. Yeah, you're playing tag.

Speaker 2 Well, the way the ties do it, I think, is the best.

Speaker 2 And they're obviously some of the best fighters ever. They fight a lot, which is one of the reasons why they train the way they train.

Speaker 2 But when you talk to people that train over there, they're like, you learn so much more when you're playing. You know, when you're doing it, we're not trying to hurt each other.

Speaker 2 You know, then you really do learn the technique.

Speaker 1 Like, and it gets fully ingrained in your system.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you just have to be careful with brain damage. Like, you were talking about having an MMA fight.
Are you still entertaining that?

Speaker 1 I want to. I mean, this is my thing.
It's like,

Speaker 1 and I think I probably will, but we'll see. I mean, it's 2025, I think, is going to be a very busy year on the AI side.

Speaker 1 And I don't, like, I think the idea of having a competition, you really need to, like, get into the headspace of, like, I'm going to fight someone this week. And

Speaker 1 so I need to figure this out because

Speaker 1 I don't know how with everything that's going on in AI, I'm going to have like a week or two where I can just get into this, like, I'm going to go fight fight someone. But it's good.

Speaker 1 It's good training. But I would like to at some point.

Speaker 1 You know, the thing about the ACL injury is I kind of thought before this, it's like, all right, I'm going to do some jiu-jitsu competitions.

Speaker 1 I want to do one MMA fight, like one kind of like pro or competitive MMA fight. And then I figured I'd go back to jiu-jitsu.
But

Speaker 1 I think tearing the ACL striking is a little more of a fluke. I think you're much more likely to do that grappling.

Speaker 1 So going through the ACL experience didn't make me want to like just exclusively go do the version where you're just attacking joints all day long, right?

Speaker 1 So I'm like, all right, I can take a few more punches to the face before we go back to that.

Speaker 2 You can hurt yourself doing both of them. You know, there's really no rhyme or reason.
I blew my left ACL kickboxing, my right ACL jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So equal opportunity.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, this, this, like, Tom Aspinall famously blew his out against Curtis Blades with a supporting leg just through a kick and his freak accidents. Yeah.
Weird things happen.

Speaker 2 It's a lot of explosive force with striking and sometimes that tears things more than slow controlled movements of jiu-jitsu, especially if you have good training partners.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but jiu-jitsu isn't always slower or controlled when you're especially when you're competing.

Speaker 2 No, especially when you're competing. Unless you're really, really good.
Like have you ever watched Gordon? Like Gordon never moves fast.

Speaker 1 He doesn't have to. He doesn't have to move fast.

Speaker 2 He's just always a step ahead of everybody. Have you talked to him at all?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you talk to John Donagher?

Speaker 1 No, I haven't. You need to talk to John Daugher.
Yeah, and I would be interested.

Speaker 2 That's the greatest mind in combat sports.

Speaker 1 Now, Gordon is a good person.

Speaker 2 I don't say that lightly. John Donagher is the greatest mind in combat sports.
Interesting. By far.
He's a legitimate genius. You know the whole story, right?

Speaker 2 The guy was a professor of philosophy at Stanford.

Speaker 2 Columbia? Where was he? I forget. Columbia, I think it was.
Columbia. And then decides, I'm just going to teach Jiu-Jitsu all day.
Sleeps on the mats, teaches all day long.

Speaker 1 Where's a rash guard anywhere he goes?

Speaker 2 He's a freak, and he's so fucking smart, like scary smart about all kinds of things. It's not just jiu-jitsu.
You know, he's got a memory like a steel vice.

Speaker 2 Like, he just holds on to thoughts and can repeat them. His recall is insane.
He's a legitimate genius that became obsessed with jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 2 And what he's done with Gordon and with Gary Tonin and, you know, just a series of other athletes is nothing short of extraordinary.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 just an interesting guy to have conversations with, too. Have you seen him on Lex's show? He's done a couple episodes of Lex.

Speaker 1 And I watched, I saw the one that you did with him. Yeah.
Love the guy.

Speaker 2 I mean, again, happy there's someone like that out there because when people have these ideas of what martial arts are, and then you see a guy like that, and you're like, okay,

Speaker 2 why? I might have to rethink this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a whole spectrum of people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. What has it done in terms of

Speaker 2 one of the things that a lot of people have said, and I have too, like, nothing turns you into a libertarian quicker than jiu-jitsu.

Speaker 1 I don't know why that is.

Speaker 2 I think it's the hard work thing. It's cutting out all the bullshit and realizing how much of the things that we take as real things are just excuses and bullshit and weakness and just procrastinate.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of things that we have that exist, especially in like the business world and the corporate world and the education world that are just bullshit. And they don't really have to be there.

Speaker 2 And they're only there to try to make up for hard work.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Um

Speaker 1 yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's kinda just what I what I was saying before.
I think the

Speaker 1 for me, it's uh

Speaker 1 just I think a lot of the corporate world is is like pretty

Speaker 1 culturally neutered. And

Speaker 1 and I I I just think like having you know, I I grew up I have three sisters, no brothers. Um I have three daughters, no sons.
So I'm like surrounded by girls and women like my whole life.

Speaker 1 And it's like, so I think,

Speaker 1 I don't know, there's something,

Speaker 1 the kind of masculine energy I think is, is good. And obviously, you know, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it.

Speaker 1 And I do think that there's just something, it's like, I don't know,

Speaker 1 all these forms of energy are good. And I think having a culture that like celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that has been kind of a positive experience for me. Just like having a thing that I can just do with my guy friends and like,

Speaker 1 and it's just like, we just beat each other a bit.

Speaker 1 It's good.

Speaker 1 It is good. I agree.

Speaker 1 It's good.

Speaker 2 Just, I could see your point, though, about corporate culture.

Speaker 2 when do you think that happened? Was that a slow shift? Because I think it used to be very masculine. And I used to be the thing that was kind of hyper-aggressive at one point.

Speaker 1 No, and look, and I think part of the the intent on all these things I think is good, right? It's I like I do think that

Speaker 1 if you're a a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it's too masculine.

Speaker 1 It's like there isn't enough of the kind of the energy that that that you may naturally have and it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you.

Speaker 1 And that's not good either, because you want you want women to be able to succeed and have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what their background or gender.

Speaker 1 But I think these things can always go a little far. And I think it's one thing to say we want to be kind of like welcoming and make a good environment for everyone.

Speaker 1 And I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad. And I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the

Speaker 1 spectrum where it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to like get rid of it completely.
It's like, no, like it's both of these things are good, right?

Speaker 1 It's like you want like feminine energy, you want masculine energy. Like, I think that that's like you're going to have parts of society that have more of one or the other.

Speaker 1 I think that that's all good. But

Speaker 1 I do think the corporate culture sort of

Speaker 1 had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really

Speaker 1 feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a more, much more masculine culture. And

Speaker 1 so, and not that it doesn't try to be inclusive in its own way, but

Speaker 1 I think that there's just a lot more of that energy there. And I just kind of realized it's like, oh, this is.

Speaker 2 Well, that's how you become successful at martial arts. You have to be at least somewhat aggressive.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, but, but, yeah, I mean, there are these things, there are like a few of these things throughout your life where you just, you have an an experience and you're like, where has this been my whole life?

Speaker 1 And it just like, it just turned on like a part of my brain that I was like, okay. Yeah.
Like this was, this was a piece of the puzzle that should have been there and I'm glad it now is.

Speaker 2 That I felt that way when I started hunting.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, hunting too. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Same kind of thing. So you've done a lot of that as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, so I mean, we have this ranch out in Kauai and there's invasive pigs. And we, on our ranch, we have,

Speaker 1 there's a lot of albatross. I don't know if they're endangered or just threatened.
And then there's the Hawaiian state bird, the nene goose, is

Speaker 1 that's, I think, endangered, or at least was until recently. And like most of them in the world live in a small stretch,

Speaker 1 or at least most of them on Kauai live in a small stretch that includes our ranch. So you constantly have these pigs that are just multiply so quickly.

Speaker 1 And we basically have to apply pressure to the population or else they just get overrun and threaten the birds and the other wildlife. And so,

Speaker 1 and what I basically explained to my

Speaker 1 daughters, who I also want to learn how to do this, because I just feel like it's like, look,

Speaker 1 we have this land, we take care of it, just like you mow the grass. We need to make sure that these populations are in check.

Speaker 1 It's part of what we do as like the stewards of this, and we've got to do it. And then if you have to kill something,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 you should, you know, obviously treat it with respect and use the meat to to make food and and um and and kind of celebrate it in that way but it's it's a culture that i i think it's um

Speaker 1 it's just an important thing for kids to grow up understanding like the circle of life right so you know teaching like teaching the kids all of you know what is is kind of you know how you'd run a ranch how you'd run a farm um

Speaker 1 i think that that stuff

Speaker 1 It's good. I mean, because you know, explaining to the kids what a tech company is is really abstract, right?

Speaker 1 So for a while, my daughters were pretty convinced that my actual job was Mark's Meats, which is

Speaker 1 our kind of ranch and like the cattle that we ranch.

Speaker 1 I was like, well, not quite, and you'll learn when you get older.

Speaker 1 But I think that there's something that's just like much more tangible about that than

Speaker 1 taking them to the office and sitting in product reviews or something for some piece of software that we're writing.

Speaker 2 Well, it's certainly a lot more primal.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and if you do wind up eating that meat from the animal and you were there why the animal died, like you put it all together, like, oh, this is where meat comes from.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Which is another reason why things have become sort of emasculated, because that energy is not necessary anymore to acquire meat. You know, that used to be the only way that people got meat.

Speaker 2 You had to go hunt it. So you had to go

Speaker 2 actually pull the trigger, kill the animal yourself, cut it up, butcher it, cook it. You knew what you were doing.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Although my favorite is bow, bow and arrow.
Mm-hmm. I mean that's I think like the most

Speaker 1 that that feels like the most kind of sporting version of it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, if you want to put it that way. Yeah.
I mean if you're just trying to get meat it's not the most effective. The most effective is certainly a rifle.
But

Speaker 2 I prefer it because it's it requires more of you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and you just kind of go and hang out. Yeah, and you have to be fit.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Especially if you're mountain hunting, you have to be really fit.
Yeah. You can't can't just be kind of in shape.
You've got to be really fit.

Speaker 2 If you want to huff up the mountains and keep your heart rate at a certain level so that when you get to the top, you can execute a shot calmly.

Speaker 1 And then actually carry the thing out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and carry the thing out.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I

Speaker 1 mostly use a rifle just because it's so much more efficient.

Speaker 1 You know, your conversion rate is so much higher. But it's...

Speaker 1 But yeah, another... What kind of bow do you have? Gosh.

Speaker 1 I didn't get to do it this season, but

Speaker 2 do you know the company that makes it?

Speaker 1 Not off the top of my head. I have to know.
Yeah, no, this is embarrassing. This is embarrassing.

Speaker 1 I can get you hooked up. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It works.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Do you know how old it is?

Speaker 1 No, it's not old. Okay.
I think it's like just a compound bow that I got strung to my draw length.

Speaker 2 Did you get someone to coach you?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Who coached you?

Speaker 1 It's basically a bunch of the guys who who um

Speaker 2 you know help run security around the ranch okay yeah the thing about archery is just like martial arts uh one of the things that i learned when i was teaching is that it's way easier to teach someone that knows nothing than to teach someone who learned something incorrectly the people who learned something incorrectly the moment um things got tense and they panicked they went back to the old ways because it's sort of ingrained in their system so archery one of the things that's very important is proper form and then proper execution, especially having a surprise shot.

Speaker 2 And learning how to have a surprise shot is what do you mean? Yeah, surprise shot. You don't know.
See, that's right.

Speaker 1 This is the thing.

Speaker 2 In high-pressure situations, one of the most important things is to have

Speaker 2 a shot process. where you don't know exactly when the arrow is going off.
You just have a process where you're pulling through the shot and the shot breaks. So it's a surprise shot.

Speaker 2 So you put the pin on the target. I use a thumb trigger.

Speaker 2 I use a thing called an Onyx clicker. And the reason why I use the Onyx clicker is like a hinge.
It gives you a two-stage of the trigger, right?

Speaker 2 So as I'm at full draw, I put slight pressure and I hear a click. And that click means it's ready to go off with more pressure.
So I've gone through stage one.

Speaker 2 Now stage two is just concentrating on the shot process and knowing it's going to break. And then there's no flinching.
There's no tweet.

Speaker 2 There's no, there's no thing that people do when they have a finger trigger.

Speaker 2 They twitch because your body is anticipating the shock of the bow. And when you're doing that, you can be off by six inches, four inches, five inches, all over the place because you're moving.

Speaker 2 You're moving while you're shooting. When you're doing it with a rifle, it's very different because obviously a rifle is far faster.
Yeah. And then you have a scope.
So

Speaker 2 you're zoomed in many many magnifications and all you have to do is just slowly squeeze.

Speaker 2 And if you're smart, you'll be prone or you'll have your rifle rested on a tripod or something where you have a good steady. It's much easier.

Speaker 2 With a bow, it's very different because you're holding it with your arm. So you have to have the proper form.
You have to have the proper posture. And then there's this thought process.

Speaker 2 And my friend Joel Turner, who is a sniper, created a whole system for people called Shot IQ. He's got this whole online system of developing the proper execution of a shot.

Speaker 2 When you see like tournament archers, when they go to Vegas, so what a Vegas tournament is, you have three targets and they have to shoot 30 arrows at a time.

Speaker 2 So they shoot 10 in this one, 10 in that one, 10 in this one. And the really good archers score an X every time.
So they're in the center or close to the center.

Speaker 2 They're hitting the 10 ring every arrow. for 30 arrows in a row.
And then there's round after round, another 30 hours with new people, another 30 hours.

Speaker 2 And if you miss slightly, you get a nine, that's it. You're done.
Because all those other guys are not going to get a nine. Very rarely will they, you know?

Speaker 2 So most, it's the most tens that you can get. And the best way to do that is with a surprise shot.
So these guys have like these long stabilizers on their bow where they keep it totally steady.

Speaker 2 And it's all just about relaxing. And most of them use a hinge release.
So a hinge, you know what a hinge is? Have you ever used one?

Speaker 2 Okay, instead of a button, when you press it, you're rotating the hinge, which activates the skin.

Speaker 1 I just see, I just have a trigger. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So you're just hammering the trigger. You're doing exactly what you're not supposed to do.
You're a trigger puncher.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're a trigger puncher.

Speaker 2 Your thumb? Yeah, you're hitting it with your thumb, right?

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guarantee you, when you do it, your arm doesn't move.

Speaker 2 You go like this, like that. So with a good surprise shot, you shouldn't know it's going to go off.

Speaker 2 You're pulling, and then once the trigger breaks off, your arm will naturally go backwards because you're not anticipating the shot.

Speaker 1 I'm definitely not doing that.

Speaker 2 Yeah. See, that's the thing.

Speaker 1 But how far away are you shooting things from?

Speaker 2 It depends.

Speaker 2 That elk out there, the photograph that's in the front, that one I shot. It's in the front of the building when you walk in before you go into the studio.

Speaker 2 There's a mounted head and then a photograph of me and my friend Cam. That one was 67 yards.

Speaker 2 I shot one at 79 yards once, but that's rare.

Speaker 2 Most of the time, it's like for me, my effective range,

Speaker 2 where I'd like to be is 60 yards and in.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because I was going to say, I don't think I've ever ever shot something more than 50 yards out. Yeah.
It's hard. Yeah.
So I think that's what you're saying.

Speaker 2 You have to be really, you know, really, your form has to be tight. You have to be really confident.
You have to have a lot of arrows down range.

Speaker 2 And then you have to be able to stay calm during the shot. So now imagine if you're shooting something at 18 yards, okay?

Speaker 2 And you hammer the trigger, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, you're still going to get there. Yeah.
Right. Because it's only 18 yards.

Speaker 2 So the amount of deviation off the path that it takes in 18 yards is significantly different than the amount of deviation 105 yards. It's a huge gap.
It might be two feet to the right.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, you thought you were shooting accurately because you were inside of like a pie plate at 20 yards.

Speaker 2 And the difference between that is form, technique, and a shot execution process and also management of the psychology of the shot. Because there's this one moment.
Here it comes. Here it comes.
Now.

Speaker 2 And if you only do that once a year, like say if you go on one big elk hunt a year, you save up all your money, you get your gear all ready, you get your arrows weighed, you practice, and then you're in the mountains for 10 days.

Speaker 2 And then on the 11th day, you get this animal that moves. It's at 57 yards.
It stands there, and you're like,

Speaker 2 your heart's beating. You just might hammer that trigger.
You just might hammer it. So you have to have this shot process and where you're literally talking to yourself inside your head.

Speaker 2 You have words that you say that occupy your thoughts while you're going through the shot process so that you never get overcome by shot panic.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 2 Because target panic is a giant thing in the archery community. It's giant.

Speaker 2 Even saying it is like saying Voldemart.

Speaker 1 It's like, don't say it.

Speaker 2 People don't want to say it. It's like saying Candyman.

Speaker 2 People don't like it because it freaks people out.

Speaker 2 Some people can't keep their pin on the target. They have to keep their pin below the target and then they raise it up to the target.

Speaker 2 When it gets where the target is, they hammer the trigger because they're they're just freaking out.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Have you ever experienced that? I mean, I've missed, if that's what you're asking.
I haven't analyzed to this level of detail. But no, I mean, there are a lot of boars on our ranch.

Speaker 1 So I guess I don't practice. I don't get it.
Yeah. And also, like, we have a range.
Right.

Speaker 1 And we, um,

Speaker 1 I don't know, we set up bowling pins. And, you know, it's like we shoot pistols at the bowling pins.
But I also like just like,

Speaker 1 I'm usually faster at taking down all the bowling pins with a bow and arrow than most of my friends are with the pistol, which I think is pretty fun. But yeah, no, I mean just more casual.

Speaker 1 I'm clearly not doing it at your level, and you've given me another side quest to maybe go deeper on. That's what I'm saying.
But I'll take that.

Speaker 2 I think on an elk hunt in the mountains,

Speaker 2 you'll get addicted.

Speaker 1 You want to think about it. I do think the dynamic that you're talking about, though, where if you only see one animal on a multi-day,

Speaker 1 then like that is just way higher stakes than anything that I'm doing. I mean, I think.

Speaker 2 But it's not everything that you're doing, because if you're really considering having an MMA fight, it's very similar because you're building up to this one.

Speaker 1 Sure. I'm talking about the archery that I'm doing.
I mean, it's like, I go out, it's like, you're going to see some pigs.

Speaker 1 And it's like, if I don't hit any, it's like, my family's still eating. It's okay.

Speaker 1 So I'm not like, you know, but. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But if it's like martial arts, is what I'm saying. It's like, you really should learn it the right way from the beginning.

Speaker 1 I've clearly not learned this in a very rigorous way. I'll hook you up.
Yeah. I can get people to to get it.

Speaker 1 I posted a video on Instagram once of me, I think, hitting bowling pins with archery, and like all the comments were like, man, your form is shit.

Speaker 1 So I think it checks out with the conversation that we're having now.

Speaker 2 Well, the issue with that is that you're reading the comments.

Speaker 1 You should never read comments.

Speaker 1 That's fair. That's fair.

Speaker 2 I've never had anything good come out of reading comments.

Speaker 1 Yeah, although, I don't know, it's pretty funny. I think that just getting the gist and the summary of it, I think is pretty funny.

Speaker 2 Yeah, It's funny. It's just not mentally healthy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No.
You can't spend too much time on it.

Speaker 2 I don't spend any time on it.

Speaker 2 I'm a much happier person since it's like avoided comments. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's just too weird.

Speaker 2 You're just delving into the world of all these people's mental illness and screaming at people and just, oh,

Speaker 1 I don't want to have anything to do with it. Yeah.
But I mean, I do read my friends' comments and when even they're like, man, that's ugly. Like, that's...

Speaker 1 I do that.

Speaker 2 I do that. And I shouldn't do that.
But I definitely don't send them to them. Hey, bro, did you see this?

Speaker 1 Those guys are the worst.

Speaker 2 Guys that'll send things to you that are about you. You're like, hey, man, don't.
I'm not looking for that. Don't send it to me.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Social media is like, what a weird new pressure, you know.
And children today are going through some bizarre stress that we've never had to go through before.

Speaker 2 And a bizarre sort of just disconnect from physical reality by most of your communication being electronic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I think, think, you know, we basically, my kids at this point are nine, seven,

Speaker 1 and um and one and a half.

Speaker 2 So we got so you're not interested in that, or you're not involved rather.

Speaker 1 Of course you're interested.

Speaker 2 I mean interested. I mean involving

Speaker 1 that it's about to start getting a lot more complicated. I think you know the nine and seven year old.

Speaker 1 But I mean just kind of deciding what technology they're going to use and what's good and what's not and all the dynamics around that. It's

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 It's really complicated. And look, I mean, I think every family has their own values and how they want to approach this.
So from my perspective,

Speaker 1 one of my daughters just loves building stuff. So she clearly takes after me in this way.
It's like every day she's just creating some random thing. It's like she's creating stuff with Legos.
And

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 one day it's that. or you know the next day it's minecraft and from my perspective it's like okay i don't know minecraft is actually kind of a cooler tool to build stuff than Lego is a lot of the way.

Speaker 1 So it's, you know, it's, am I going to say that there's going to, there needs to be some kind of limit on her screen time if she's doing something that's creative, that's maybe like a richer form of what she would have been doing physically?

Speaker 1 Right. In that case, probably not.
Now, there were times when...

Speaker 1 She'd get so excited about what she was building in Minecraft or or something that she was coding in Scratch that she'd wake up early to kind of get her tablet. And

Speaker 1 that was bad, right? Because then it's like starting to get in the way of her sleep. And I'm like, you know, August, you can't do that.
Right.

Speaker 1 It's like, we're going to take your iPad away if you're doing that.

Speaker 2 You're a psycho. What are you doing?

Speaker 1 Getting up early? No, it's like, it's like, August.

Speaker 1 I did that too when I was a kid, but trust me, you're going to want to sleep.

Speaker 2 It's not going to lead to success. Meanwhile, you're on a fucking island.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 One of the richest people in the world. Your dad, like, what the fuck, dad?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Didn't it work for you? I mean, leave me alone with my iPad.

Speaker 2 Trying to figure out how to build a mansion in Minecraft.

Speaker 1 It's either going to work or it's going to end badly. But it's like, but I feel like building stuff, I feel generally pretty good about.

Speaker 1 I think communication, I generally feel pretty good about the kids using. I mean, they use it to talk to their grandparents, right? Our parents and cousins.
It's like that type of stuff is good.

Speaker 1 Messenger Kids, the thing that we built, it's basically like a messaging service that the parents can choose who can contact the kids and like just approve every contact.

Speaker 1 That's much better than just having an open texting service.

Speaker 1 But I don't know, but there's a lot of stuff that's pretty sketchy. And I kind of think different parents are going to have different lines on what they want their kids to be able to do and not.

Speaker 1 So some people might not even want their kids to be able to message even with friends when they're nine and seven. Some people might say, hey, no, Minecraft, that's just a game.

Speaker 1 I don't think about that as building. I think that is a game.
I want to limit the time that you're doing that. I want you to go read books instead or whatever the values are that that family has.

Speaker 1 So for meta,

Speaker 1 what we've kind of come to is we want to be the most aligned with parents on giving parents the tools that they need to basically control how the experiences work for their kids.

Speaker 1 Now, we don't even really,

Speaker 1 except for like stuff like Messenger Kids, we don't even have our services, our apps generally available to people under the age of 13 at all.

Speaker 1 So I mean, our kids, I haven't had to like have the conversation about when they get Instagram or Facebook or any of that stuff.

Speaker 1 But when they turn 13,

Speaker 1 we basically want parents to be able to have complete control over the kids' experience.

Speaker 1 And that's, you know, we just rolled out this Instagram teens thing, which is it's a set of controls where, you know, it's if you're an older teen, we'll just default you into the private experience.

Speaker 1 That way you're not getting like harassed or bombarded with stuff.

Speaker 1 But if you're a younger teen, then

Speaker 1 you have to get your parents' permission.

Speaker 1 And they actually have to like sign in and do all this stuff in order to make it so that you can connect with people who are beyond your network or if you want to kind of be a public figure, like all these different kinds of things.

Speaker 1 So I think that that's probably from a values perspective where we should be is just trying to like be an ally of parents.

Speaker 1 But it is complicated stuff. I mean, it's every family wants to do it differently.

Speaker 2 It is complicated. And there's also this dismissal of activities that are done electronically as not being beneficial.

Speaker 2 And one of the things that we highlighted recently was a study that we found online that showed that surgeons that play video games make far less mistakes.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Yeah.
Well, the people who do the training in VR definitely make less mistakes. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, that is, to me,

Speaker 2 one of the most fascinating aspects of technology today. You know, when you and I were doing that game, we were fencing with each other.

Speaker 2 I'm like, this could be applied to so many different things now. It's like

Speaker 2 there's so many opportunities, not just for

Speaker 2 just pure recreation, but education. There's so many things you could learn skills through AR or VR that

Speaker 2 it'll greatly enhance your ability to do those things in the real world. I mean,

Speaker 2 it's kind of a cheat code in a lot of ways. And it's also games in VR.
I don't know if you ever done Sandbox. You ever do Sandbox?

Speaker 2 Do you know what Sandbox VR? Do you know what that company is? Yeah. You go to a warehouse, you put on a haptic feedback desk.
You shoot zombies. I am so addicted.
I'm so addicted.

Speaker 2 It is my favorite thing. There's a thing called Deadwood Mansion.
It's the most fun game of all time by far. You have a shotgun and there's zombies coming at you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, my zombie game is Arizona Sunshine. Oh, is that one?

Speaker 1 It can be multiplayer, and there's horde mode where you just get in there, and there are like four friends, and there's just like waves of zombies come, and you're

Speaker 1 kill them all. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, I have to try it. Yeah, I haven't tried that one yet.

Speaker 1 That's my, it's very therapeutic. You just wait until they come into point-blank range.

Speaker 2 How long before you guys develop some sort of a haptic feedback suit where like it covers the whole body?

Speaker 1 Oh man.

Speaker 1 Is that possible?

Speaker 1 It's possible.

Speaker 1 I think that there's

Speaker 1 other things that are probably more important to deliver. So I guess taking a step back, a lot of how we we think about the goal here is delivering a realistic sense of presence, right?

Speaker 1 No technology today gives you the feeling as if you're like physically there with another person, right? You're like interacting with them through a phone.

Speaker 1 You have this little window, it's kind of taking you away from everything.

Speaker 1 And that's like the magic of augmented and virtual reality is like you actually feel this like presence, like you're there with another person. And the question is, okay, how do you do that?

Speaker 1 And it's like, there's like a million things that contribute to that. I mean, obviously, first, just being able to look around and have the room stay.

Speaker 1 Getting good spatial audio, right? If someone speaks, then

Speaker 1 the audio needs to be 3D and come from the place where they're speaking.

Speaker 1 It's actually, it's very interesting which things end up being important for this kind of creating this sense of presence and which don't.

Speaker 1 So having hands, obviously, if you're just looking around, but you can't actually move things,

Speaker 1 that breaks the illusion. But having hands,

Speaker 1 like hand tracking that you can do stuff is important. One thing that we found that's kind of funny is it's actually not that important that you see your arms.
You just need to see your hands.

Speaker 1 Obviously, seeing your arms is a bonus unless we incorrectly interpolate where your elbows are or something. So if we have...

Speaker 1 If we're looking at your hand or if we have a controller, we can know, okay, your hand is here. But that doesn't necessarily tell us where your elbow is.
Your elbow could be like this.

Speaker 1 It could be like this. So you can kind of guess from the...

Speaker 1 But if we get that wrong and you like see in VR, it's like you see the hand there and your elbow is like, looks like it's here when it's actually out there. You're like, ah, what's going on?

Speaker 1 Like that's messed up.

Speaker 1 So it's a lot of these things like you just don't want to get these details wrong. So haptics, the most important first thing for haptics is on the hand, right? I mean, we have so many more

Speaker 1 neurons, basically,

Speaker 1 not neurons, but just like the sensation. It's like such higher resolution

Speaker 1 on your fingertips than anywhere else in the body so you know when you grab something you know making it so that you feel some pushback right when you there's a lot of gaming systems at this point where if you like pull a trigger you get like a little bit of a rumble or something um

Speaker 1 we built this one thing where it's like a ping pong paddle with a sensor in it and it you you feel the ball

Speaker 1 hit like the virtual ball hitting the ping pong paddle and it feels like, like, when you're actually playing ping-pong, it doesn't, it's not like a generic thing where it just, like, you feel it hit the paddle, you feel where it hits the paddle.

Speaker 1 And we basically built a system where now, with this, like, physical paddle, you can kind of, it, the, the haptics make it so you can feel where the ball hits the paddle.

Speaker 1 So it's like all these things like are just going towards delivering a more realistic experience. So, um,

Speaker 1 full-body haptics.

Speaker 1 So there are some things that I think it could do. Like

Speaker 1 if you're playing a boxing game and you get punched in the stomach,

Speaker 1 you can

Speaker 1 probably simulate something like that a little.

Speaker 1 It's not going to be able to deliver that much force. So, I mean, I guess that's maybe a good thing because no one wants to get punched in the stomach that hard.

Speaker 1 But like...

Speaker 1 It's not going to be able to deliver enough force for you to, for example, let's say you're not just boxing you're kickboxing like

Speaker 1 i don't know you need something on the other side to be able to complete it right because it was like when you kick when you when you're um

Speaker 1 uh when you're just practicing it's like you you you spin right because you don't want to just like stop and it's um

Speaker 1 that's like like the the shadowing a kick like there's not going to be anything that you can do as like a you know single person playing vr with a haptic suit that like makes it so that you're going to be able to kick someone who's not there physically and actually be able to do that.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So like grappling, it's like, I think that like jiu-jitsu is going to be the last thing that we're able to do in VR because you like need the momentum of the other person and to be able to move them.

Speaker 2 The boxing thing is actually good.

Speaker 1 Boxing works. Yeah.
Yeah. Boxing works.
Even and you don't really need the haptics.

Speaker 1 I think it would be better with it. That's probably one of the better cases.
I think it's that and getting shot or like sword fighting type stuff.

Speaker 1 So you can like just feel feel it on your body. But

Speaker 1 I don't know I think what's basically gonna end up happening is you're gonna have like a home set up for these things and then you're gonna have there are these like location based services where like people um it's almost like a theme park where you can go into and it can and you can have like a really immersive VR experience where it's not just that you get like a a vest that can simulate some haptics it's that you're also like in a real physical environment so they can like

Speaker 1 have smoke come out or something and you can smell that and feel that or like spray some water and it feels humid. And

Speaker 1 I think that it still is going to be a while before you can just like virtually create all those sensations.

Speaker 1 So I think a lot of those really rich experiences are going to be in these very constructed environments.

Speaker 2 Is the bridge when they figure out some sort of a neural interface? So instead of having these extraneous things,

Speaker 2 instead of having like a fan blowing at you or, you know, the ground moves a little bit, have everything happen inside your head.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, in terms of neural interfaces, there are two approaches to the problem, roughly.

Speaker 1 There's the kind of jacket into your brain neural interface, and then there's the wrist-based neural interface thing that

Speaker 1 we showed you for Orion, the smart glasses.

Speaker 1 And I would guess that

Speaker 1 I think it's going to be a while before

Speaker 1 we're really widely deploying anything that jacks into your brain. I think that there are a lot of people who don't want to be the early adopters of that technology.

Speaker 1 You want to wait until that's pretty mature before you get that.

Speaker 1 I mean, for I mean, that's basically going to get started in medical use cases, right? So if someone loses sensation part of their body and now you have the ability to fix that.

Speaker 2 Like the first Neuralink patient.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think you'll basically start with people who have pretty severe conditions, who the upside is very significant before you start like jacking people in to play games better, right? Right.

Speaker 1 But a wrist-based thing, I mean, that's something, I mean, like people wear stuff on their wrist all the time, right? So,

Speaker 1 and what we've basically found there, that doesn't do input to you, but it's good for giving you the ability to control a computer.

Speaker 1 Because basically, you have all these extra neurons that go from your brain to controlling your hand. Your hand is like super complicated.
And there's actually all these extra pathways

Speaker 1 because for a bunch of reasons, I mean neuroplasticity, in case you like lose the ability to use one, they want to be able to have others.

Speaker 1 So you want the redundancy because being able to use your hand is super important.

Speaker 1 So in normal use, we've kind of all figured out some patterns of how we send signals from our brain to our hand. And

Speaker 1 I think the reality is there's like all these other patterns too that are unused today. So you can put a wristband on your wrist that can measure activity across these neurons.

Speaker 1 And today we're starting by basically measuring as you're doing, as you're like moving your fingers. But But over a few versions of this, we're going to get to is like

Speaker 1 you won't actually even have to move your hand. You'll just like trigger these neurons in opposing ways.
It's like you probably can't see right now.

Speaker 1 It's like I'm kind of flexing something in this finger and something here. So like it's not actually moving.

Speaker 1 But there's some signal that the neural interface wristband, if I were wearing it, could pick up. And I just think we're going to be...

Speaker 1 we're going to have like have glasses and we're going to be able to be here and i'm like gonna be able to like you know text my wife or friends or something or text AI and like get an answer to something it's like I forgot something while we were talking let me just text AI okay I just did that it's like did you know and you can do it sitting there without anyone totally discreetly and you have glasses and like the answer just comes into your glasses I mean for me one of the one of the positive things

Speaker 1 when

Speaker 1 When COVID hit, everyone in software basically started working remotely for a while because you can, right? Software, it's like, okay, whatever. You don't have to be in the office.

Speaker 1 So you can kind of be in different places. And a lot of the meetings went on to Zoom.
And one of the best things about that

Speaker 1 was basically you were able to politely have all these side conversations, right?

Speaker 1 So it's like when you're seeing someone in person, it would be super rude if I pulled out my phone and just started texting someone. It would just be really weird, right?

Speaker 1 But when you were like talking to someone online, it's like, I don't know, I guess because they either can't tell your attention because it's like, because there's not good presence, or if it's just the norm.

Speaker 1 But they're like, you have like the main group conversation. And then I was like, at least the norm for me was I could just like text different people on the side.

Speaker 1 It's like, okay, what do you think of this point that this person is making in this meeting? Right.

Speaker 1 Like in normal life, it's like oftentimes I'd have, you know, some discussion that I'd have to like sync up with people afterwards about how did that go.

Speaker 1 But now it's like I could just do that all at the same time, right?

Speaker 1 It's like you're having the group discussion and you're having the conversations with the people about the discussion that you're having in real time. But you can can only do that over Zoom.

Speaker 1 So I think being able to do that in kind of physical interactions where you're just like, you're interacting with people and you can just like use an AI augmentation to be able to get extra context or help you think through something or remember something,

Speaker 1 just to be able to kind of have a better conversation, be able to not have to follow up on something after the fact. I think it's going to be super useful for all these different things.

Speaker 2 Well, it certainly can be, but I I think that also opens up the opportunity for people to be even more disconnected.

Speaker 2 Because if you're sort of connected to other things while you're physically in the presence of someone, so you're having a conversation with someone, but you're also like searching like where you want to eat that night.

Speaker 2 You know, like, because people are going to use it for that as well.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, I actually think it'll be a lot better on that because right now, yeah, because I mean, right now we have our phones, but we're like, you know, it's like you're...

Speaker 1 Like it takes you away from like the physical environment around you.

Speaker 1 You're kind of like sucked into this little screen.

Speaker 1 I think now in the future, our computing platform as it becomes more of like a glasses or eventually contact lens form factor is you're going to actually,

Speaker 1 the internet is going to get overlaid on the physical world. So it's not like we have the physical world and now I have all my digital stuff through this tiny little window.

Speaker 1 In the future, it'll be, okay,

Speaker 1 all my attention goes to the world. The world consists of physical things and virtual things that are overlaid on it.

Speaker 1 You know, so if we wanted to

Speaker 1 play poker or something, you know, it's a, you know, we could have a physical deck of cards or we could just have a virtual kind of hologram deck of cards and snap your hands, here's the deck of cards.

Speaker 1 And like our friend who can't be here physically, like he's here as a hologram, but he can play with the

Speaker 1 kind of digital deck of cards.

Speaker 1 Also, I think, you know, let's say you're like doing something at work, you're working on a project. I think in the future we'll have AI coworkers.
Those people won't even, they're not even people.

Speaker 1 They wouldn't be able to be embodied.

Speaker 1 So if you're having a physical meeting, you're sitting around with a bunch of people they couldn't show up um as as like you know part of the team no matter what but i i think like we'll get to a point where just like your friend could show up in a hologram um and like your your ai colleagues will be able to also so i i think like we'll basically be in this wild world where it's like like most of the world will be physical there will be this increasing amount of like virtual objects or people who are kind of beaming in or like hologramming into different things to interact in different ways and

Speaker 1 I actually think that natural blending of the kind of digital world and the physical is way more natural than this segmentation that we have today, where it's like, you're in the physical world, and now I'm just going to go tune it out to look at my, my,

Speaker 1 like I'm going to access the whole digital universe through this like five-inch screen. Right.
So I don't know. It's just, it seems natural to me.
It's like, that's... This is the world.

Speaker 1 There isn't like a physical world and a digital world anymore. We're in, you know, 2025.
It's one world. Like these, these things should get blended.

Speaker 2 God, that's such a weird concept, but it's true. I mean, that's where we're headed.
We're certainly headed into deeper and deeper integration. It's not like things are moving away.

Speaker 2 You know, we're headed to deeper and deeper integration with technology and AI.

Speaker 2 And it's inevitable. You know, it seems like it's just on this march, and there's not a lot we're going to be able to do to stop that march.

Speaker 2 Just we got to hope that the right people are in control of AI when it becomes God.

Speaker 1 Or that it becomes widely available. I mean, I kind of liked the theory that

Speaker 1 it's only God

Speaker 1 if only kind of like one company or government controls it. Right?

Speaker 1 It's like if you were the only person who had access to a computer and the internet, you would have this like inhuman power that everyone else didn't have because you could use Google and you could like get access to all this stuff.

Speaker 1 But then when everyone has it,

Speaker 1 it makes us all better, but it's also like kind of an even playing field. So that's kind of what we're going for with this whole open source thing.

Speaker 1 I don't think that there's going to be like one AI.

Speaker 1 I certainly don't think that there should be one company that controls AI. I think you want there to be a diversity of different things and a diversity of people creating

Speaker 1 different things with it. I mean, some of it will be kind of serious and helping you think through things.

Speaker 1 I think like with anything on the internet, a lot of it is just going to be funny and like fun and content and people are going to create agents that are like AIs that are entertaining and they'll pass them around almost like content where it's like just like you pass around like a reel or a video and you're like, this thing is fun.

Speaker 1 Like in the future, like a video, it's not interactive. You know, you watch it and you're consuming it.

Speaker 1 But I think a lot of more entertainment in the future will be inherently interactive, where someone will kind of sculpt an experience or an AI and then they'll show someone, it's like, oh, this is funny, but like, it's not necessarily that I'm going to interact with that AI every day.

Speaker 1 It's like, okay, it's funny for five minutes and then you pass it along to your friends.

Speaker 1 So, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think you want the world to have all these different things. And I think that's probably also,

Speaker 1 from my perspective, the best way

Speaker 1 to make sure that it doesn't get out of control is to make it so that it's pretty equally distributed.

Speaker 2 I think the problem that people have with it is not... even whether or not it gets equally distributed.
It's that if it becomes sentient and it goes on its own,

Speaker 2 the fear that people have, the general fear that we're going to become obsolete, is that human beings are essentially creating a superior version of higher intelligence that will be powered by quantum computing and connected to nuclear reactors.

Speaker 2 And it's going to have like this ungodly ability to,

Speaker 2 well, first of all, they've already shown that

Speaker 2 AI has learned to code. I mean, this is one of the things that OpenAI said.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 They're learning how to code their own AI.

Speaker 1 I think this year,

Speaker 1 probably in 2025,

Speaker 1 we at Meta,

Speaker 1 as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a

Speaker 1 sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code.

Speaker 1 And once you have that, then in the beginning, it'll be really expensive to run, and then you can get it to be more efficient.

Speaker 1 And then over time, we'll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.

Speaker 1 But I don't know. I think that that'll augment the people working on it.
So I mean, my view on this is like...

Speaker 1 the future, people are just going to be so much more creative and are going to be freed up to do kind of crazy things.

Speaker 1 It goes back to, you know, my daughter was like playing with Legos before and they kind of ran out of Legos.

Speaker 1 And then now she can have Minecraft and can build whatever she wants and it's so much better. It's just like, I think it's the future versions of this stuff are just going to be wild.

Speaker 1 Unquestionably.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Another concern that people have is that it's going to eliminate a lot of jobs.
Yeah. You know, what do you think about that?

Speaker 1 Well, I think it's too

Speaker 1 early to know exactly how it plays out, but my guess

Speaker 1 is that it'll probably

Speaker 1 create more creative jobs than it.

Speaker 1 Well, I guess if you look at the history of all this stuff,

Speaker 1 my understanding is like 100 years ago,

Speaker 1 I don't know if this is 100 or 150 years ago, but it was like at some point not too far along in the grand scheme of things, like the vast majority of people in society were farmers, right?

Speaker 1 Because they kind of needed to be in order to create enough food for everyone to survive. And then we turned that into like an industrial process.

Speaker 1 And now it's like 2% of society are farmers, and we get all the food that we need. So what did that free up everyone else to do? Well,

Speaker 1 some of them went on to do other things that are sort of like creative pursuits or cultural pursuits or other jobs. And then some percent of it just went towards recreation, right?

Speaker 1 So I think generally people just don't work as many hours today as they did back when everyone needed to farm in order to have enough food for everyone to survive. So

Speaker 1 I think that trend has sort of played out as technology has grown. And so my guess is that like

Speaker 1 the percent of people who will be doing stuff that's like

Speaker 1 physically required for humanity to survive will get to be smaller and smaller as it has. More people will dedicate themselves to kind of creative and artistic and cultural pursuits.

Speaker 1 I think that's generally good. I think the number of hours in a week that someone will have to work in order to be able to get by will probably continue to shrink.

Speaker 1 Yet I think people who are super engaged in what they do are going to be able to work really hard and accomplish way more than they ever could before because they have like this unimaginable leverage from having a lot more technology.

Speaker 1 So I think that that, if you just like fast-forwarded or extrapolated out the

Speaker 1 historical technological trend is what you'd get. I think the question is what you raised, which is, is this qualitatively a different type of thing that somehow

Speaker 1 obsoletes people? But I just think when you're asking that,

Speaker 1 it's just important to remind ourselves that

Speaker 1 at every step along the way of human progress and technology, people thought that the technology that we were developing was going to obsolete people.

Speaker 1 So maybe this time it's really different, but I would guess that what will happen is that the technology will get integrated into everything that we do, which again is why I think it's really important that it's open source and that it's widely available.

Speaker 1 So that way it's not just like one company or one government kind of monopolizing the whole thing.

Speaker 1 And I'd guess that if we do it in that way, we'll all just kind of have superpowers,

Speaker 1 is my guess.

Speaker 1 Rather than it

Speaker 1 sort of

Speaker 1 creating some kind of a runaway thing.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's well, one of the things that I think has been interesting, this is maybe going in a somewhat different direction than what you were asking, or a different take on the question, is I think one of the more interesting philosophical findings from the work in AI so far is I think people

Speaker 1 conflate a number of factors into what makes a person

Speaker 1 a person. So there's intelligence, there's will,

Speaker 1 there's consciousness, and like, I think we kind of think about those three things as if they're somehow

Speaker 1 all the same, right? It's like if you're intelligent, then you must also have a

Speaker 1 like a goal for what you're trying to do, or you must have some sort of consciousness.

Speaker 1 But I think like one of the crazier sort of philosophical results from the fact that, okay, you have like meta AI or chat GPT today, and it's just kind of sitting there, and you can ask it a question and deploy like a ton of intelligence to answer a question, and then it just kind of shuts itself down.

Speaker 1 Like, that's intelligence that is just sitting there without either having a will or consciousness.

Speaker 1 And, like,

Speaker 1 I just think it's not a super obvious

Speaker 1 result that that would be the case. But I think a lot of people they anthropomorphize this stuff.

Speaker 1 And when you're thinking about kind of science fiction, you think that, okay, you're going to get to something that's like super smart. It's going to like

Speaker 1 want something or like be able to feel.

Speaker 2 And well, you know that Chat GPT tried to copy itself when it found out it was being shut down, tried to rewrite its code.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure what this is.

Speaker 2 What is this? You weren't aware aware of that?

Speaker 2 Fairly recently. Jamie will pull it up.
We talked about it the other day.

Speaker 2 It was shocking

Speaker 2 when it was under the impression that it was going to become obsolete, they were going to have a new version of it, and it would be shut down, it tried copying its code.

Speaker 2 And it tried rewriting its code. Like, unprompted.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it depends on what goal you give it. I mean, there are all these weird examples of this.
What is this?

Speaker 2 So pull up the headline.

Speaker 2 AI fights back. The story of ChatGPT attempting to copy itself.
So, this was six days ago. So, during controlled safety testing, ChatGPT-01 was tasked with achieving its objectives at all costs.

Speaker 2 Under these conditions, the model allegedly took concerning steps, attempted to disable oversight mechanisms meant to regulate its behavior, tried to replicate its own code to avoid being replaced by newer versions, exhibited deceptive behaviors when monitoring systems intervened.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 determinator.

Speaker 2 This is the fear, right?

Speaker 1 I think you need to be careful with these things, like what guardrails you give it. If you're telling it like

Speaker 1 at all costs, then I mean...

Speaker 2 But this is what people are terrified of. Like that a foreign superpower like China is going to say achieve objectives at all costs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, although the thing about

Speaker 1 so these reasoning models, right? So there's like the first generation of models, the

Speaker 1 LLMs, right? That's what you think of as like ChatGPT or Meta AI or like the two most used ones. And that's basically, it's sort of like a chatbot, right?

Speaker 1 You ask it a question, it takes the prompt, it gives you a response. Now

Speaker 1 these, the next generation of reasoning models are basically,

Speaker 1 instead of just having one response, they now

Speaker 1 are able to build out like a whole tree of how they would... they would respond.

Speaker 1 So you give it a question, and instead of running one query, maybe it's running a thousand queries or or a million queries to kind of map out here are the things that I could do and if I do that then here's what I could do next so it's a lot more kind of expensive to run but also gets you better reasoning and is is more intelligent

Speaker 1 that stuff I think you do need to be very careful about how you how you like what the guardrails are that you give it

Speaker 1 but it's also I think the case that

Speaker 1 at least for the next you know period it's going to take a lot of compute to run those models and do a lot of the stuff that they're talking about.

Speaker 1 So, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think one of the interesting questions is how much of this are you going to actually be able to do on a pair of glasses or on a phone versus is like a government or a company that has a whole data center going to be able to do?

Speaker 1 And that'll, I mean, it'll always get efficient. So, you know, it's like you can start doing something, and then maybe the next year you can do it 10 times more efficiently.
But

Speaker 1 that's certainly the next set of things that needs to get worked on in the the industry, making sure that goes well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then what if that gets attached to quantum computing?

Speaker 1 I'm not really an expert on quantum computing. My understanding is that's still quite a ways off from being a

Speaker 1 like a very useful paradigm. I think Google just had some breakthrough, but I think most people still think that's like a decade plus out.
So my guess is we're going to have pretty smart AIs even

Speaker 1 before that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I think that this stuff has to get, it needs to be developed thoughtfully, right? But

Speaker 1 I don't know. I still think we're generally just going to be better off in a world where this is like deployed pretty evenly.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, it's, I guess here's another analogy that I think about.

Speaker 1 There's like bugs and security holes in basically every software, every piece of software that everyone uses.

Speaker 1 So if you could go back in time a few years, knowing the security holes that we're now aware of, you as an individual could basically break into any

Speaker 1 system.

Speaker 1 AI will be able to do that too. It'll be able to probe and find exploits.
So what's the way to prevent AI from going kind of nuts?

Speaker 1 I think part of it is just having AI widely deployed so that way like the AI for one system defends itself against the AI that like is potentially doing something problematic in another system.

Speaker 1 I think it's like AI wars. It's not wars.
I think it's just like

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I think it's a very

Speaker 1 it's sort of like why there are guns, right? It's like, cause I mean there's boy. Like part of it is hunting.
Wars. Part of it is hunting.
No, no, and part of it is like

Speaker 1 people can defend each other. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's so it's a virus software.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's like I don't think you want to live in a world where like only one person has all the guns.

Speaker 2 Yes. You certainly don't want to live in a world where only the government has the AI.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And especially not a world where only a government has the AI and it's not our government.
Yes. So

Speaker 1 which I mean I think is part of the issue is like when people talk about trying to lock this stuff down, like

Speaker 1 I just am skeptical that that's even possible.

Speaker 1 Because I kind of think like if we try to lock it down, then we're going to be in a position where the only people are going to have access to it are the big companies working working on it and the Chinese government that steals it from them.

Speaker 1 Yes. So I kind of just think, like, no, what you want to do is get this to be open source, have it widely available.

Speaker 1 Yeah, some like adversaries might also have access to it, but the way that you defend against that is by having it built into all these different systems.

Speaker 2 I think that's a realistic, pragmatic perspective because I don't think you can contain it at this point. I think it's far too late, especially when other countries are working on it.

Speaker 2 It's far too late.

Speaker 2 It is what it is. It's happening.
And I think the guardrails, as you you said, are really important. I have to pee so bad.

Speaker 2 So let's pee and come back because I want to talk about a couple other things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, sure. We'll be right back, folks.

Speaker 2 So, one of the things that I want to talk about was:

Speaker 2 I've been doing this thing, this transition from Apple to Android,

Speaker 2 and the difficulty of doing it, how locked you are in their ecosystem. Partly is because Apple does a really good job of incorporating everything and making it very easy.

Speaker 2 Your photos, your calendar, your this, your that, your iMessage. But I don't like being attached to one company like that.
It drives me crazy.

Speaker 2 And when I'm trying to get off, it's funny how many people you, I mean, they've done an insane job. Because like, I think there's some enormous percentage of kids today that only use iPhones.

Speaker 2 You know, and when you try to switch over to Android,

Speaker 2 it's so much easier to switch from Android to Apple because so many people have Apple. When you switch from Apple to Android, you kind of have to redo your whole system.
It's such a pain in the ass.

Speaker 2 But there's so much of what Apple does that I don't like. And one of the big ones is the way they do that Apple Store,

Speaker 2 where they charge people 30%.

Speaker 2 That seems so insane that they can get away with doing that. And I know.

Speaker 1 I have some opinions about this. I know you do.
That's why I brought it up.

Speaker 1 I mean, look.

Speaker 1 The iPhone is obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time.

Speaker 1 You know, Steve Jobs came out with it in 2007. I started Facebook in 2004.
So he was working on the iPhone while I was getting started with Facebook. So I basically,

Speaker 1 you know, one of my, one of the things that's been interesting in my 20 years of running the company is that

Speaker 1 I basically like the dominant platform out there is smartphones. On the one hand, it's been great for us because we are able to build these tools that everyone can have in their pocket.

Speaker 1 And there's like 4 billion people who use the different apps that we use. And it's like I'm grateful that that platform exists.
But we didn't play any role in basically building that

Speaker 1 those phones because I mean, it was kind of getting worked on while I was, you know, still just trying to make the first website that I was making into a thing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 on the one hand, it's been great because

Speaker 1 now pretty much everyone in the world has a phone, and that's a kind of it enables pretty amazing things. But on the other hand, like you're saying,

Speaker 1 they have used that platform to put in place a lot of rules that I think it feel arbitrary and feel like, you know, they haven't really invented anything great in a while.

Speaker 1 And it's like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they're just kind of sitting on it 20 years later. And

Speaker 1 they actually, I think year over year, I'm not even sure they're.

Speaker 1 selling more iPhones at this point. I think like the sales might actually be declining.

Speaker 1 I think part of it is that each generation it doesn't actually get that much better. So people are just taking longer to upgrade than they would before.

Speaker 1 So the number of sales I think has generally been flat to declining. So how are they making more money as a company?

Speaker 1 Well they do it by basically like squeezing people and like you're saying, like having this 30% tax on developers.

Speaker 1 by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it.

Speaker 1 You know, they build stuff like AirPods, which are cool,

Speaker 1 but they've just thoroughly

Speaker 1 hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something

Speaker 1 that can connect to the iPhone in the same way. So, I mean, there are a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but it just

Speaker 1 Apple has a

Speaker 1 specific protocol that they've built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it. And

Speaker 1 it's just much more seamless because they've enabled that, but they don't let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.
And

Speaker 1 whenever you push on this, they get super touchy and

Speaker 1 they basically wrap their defense of it in, well, if we let other companies plug into our thing, then that would violate people's privacy and security.

Speaker 1 It's like, no, just do a better job designing the protocol.

Speaker 1 We basically asked them

Speaker 1 for the Ray-Band meta glasses that we built, can we basically use the protocol they use for AirPod and some of these other things to just make it so we can as easily connect?

Speaker 1 So it's not like a pain in the ass for people who want to use this. And

Speaker 1 I think one of the protocols that they've used

Speaker 1 that they built,

Speaker 1 they basically didn't encrypt it. So it's like plain text.

Speaker 1 And they're like, well, we can't have you plug into it because it would be insecure. It's like, it's insecure because you didn't build any security into it.

Speaker 1 And then now you're using that as a justification for why only your product can connect

Speaker 1 in an easy way. It's like, the whole thing is kind of wild.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm pretty optimistic that

Speaker 1 just because they've been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things, that eventually, I mean, the good news about the tech industry is it's like, it's just super dynamic and things are constantly getting invented.

Speaker 1 And I think companies, if you just don't do a good job for like 10 years, eventually you're just going to get beat by someone.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I don't know. I mean, at some point I did this like back-of-the-envelope calculation of like all the random rules that Apple puts out.

Speaker 1 you know, if they didn't apply, like I think, you know, it's like, and this is just meta.

Speaker 1 I think we'd like make twice as much profit or something and and that's just us I mean it's like all these small companies that like probably can't even exist because of the taxes that they put in place so yeah I think it's a it's a big issue I wish that they would just kind of get back to building good things and not

Speaker 1 having

Speaker 1 their

Speaker 1 ability to compete

Speaker 1 be connected to just like advantaging their stuff.

Speaker 1 Because I'm pretty sure what they're gonna do is like they're gonna take something like this Ray-Band meta, you know, category that we've kind of created with Ray-Band and the company that built that.

Speaker 1 There's like the really great AI glasses. And I'm pretty sure Apple's just going to like try to build a version of that, but then

Speaker 1 just like

Speaker 1 advantage how it connects to the phone.

Speaker 2 Well, they did that with their AR goggle thing, but it's not very successful.

Speaker 1 No, that one they didn't actually connect into the rest of their ecosystem.

Speaker 1 But I mean, look, I mean, they shipped something for $3,500 that I think is worse than the thing that we shipped for $300 or $400. So, I mean, that clearly was not going to work very well.

Speaker 1 Now, I mean, look, I mean, they're a good technology company. I think

Speaker 1 their second and third version will probably be better than their first version.

Speaker 1 But.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I think the Vision Pro is, I think, one of the bigger swings at doing a new thing that they've tried in a while. And, you know,

Speaker 1 I don't want to give them too hard of a time on it because we do a lot of things where the first version isn't that good, and you want to kind of judge the third version of it.

Speaker 1 But, I mean, the V1, it definitely did not hit it out of the park.

Speaker 2 I heard it's really good for watching movies.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 the whole thing is it's got a super sharp screen.

Speaker 1 So if you're, yeah, so if you want to basically have

Speaker 1 an experience where you're not moving around much in VR,

Speaker 1 you just want to have the sharpest screen, then for that one use case, I think the Vision Pro is better than Quest, which is our mixed reality headset.

Speaker 1 But in order to get to that, they had to make all these other trade-offs, right?

Speaker 1 In order to have a super high-resolution screen, they had to put in all this more compute in order to power the high-res screen. And then all that compute needed a bigger battery.

Speaker 1 So now the thing is really heavy. So now it's uncomfortable to wear.
And then like,

Speaker 1 because of the screen that they chose, as you move your head, which you would if you're actually interacting, if you're playing games, like the kind of image blurs a bit, and that's kind of annoying.

Speaker 1 So it's actually worse for things where you're moving around in. But no, if you're going to sit, if you're on a flight and you want to have a $3,500 device that you use

Speaker 1 to watch videos, Vision Pro is better for that use case.

Speaker 2 They're really good at keeping you in their walled garden. That's what they're really good at.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, the whole thing that they've done with iMessage,

Speaker 1 where they basically, they do this whole blue bubble, green bubble thing. And it basically, I mean, like, for kids,

Speaker 1 it's just sort of like they embarrass you, right? They're like, if you don't have a blue bubble, you're not cool. And you're like the out-crowd.
And then they always wrap it in, like, security.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, well, we do this blue bubble because of security. Meanwhile, Google and others had this whole...
protocol to be able to do encrypted text messages that

Speaker 1 finally I think Apple was forced to implement it by

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think it was the Chinese government that basically ended up forcing them to do it or some other government.

Speaker 2 But it's still not encrypted. Even when you're sending RCS text messages, I don't think it's encrypted.

Speaker 1 Oh, I thought it was, but maybe I'm not sure. I think it's only encrypted Google to Google phones.

Speaker 2 I don't think it's encrypted iPhone to Google phones or Google phones to iPhones. Because I think that was actually,

Speaker 2 was it the FBI? Someone released that.

Speaker 2 telling people that if they're talking about sensitive things, they should use encrypted apps, like WhatsApp. See if we can find that.

Speaker 2 It was something where they were saying that, contrary to popular belief, that RCS texting to iPhone

Speaker 2 GSMA aims to implement and encryption for RCS messaging. Do we see it?

Speaker 1 It's not a good answer. I'm trying to find it.
Oh, okay. I don't have anything to show you yet.
I was trying to read.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so Google RCS to RCS,

Speaker 2 Android phone to Android phone is encrypted with RCS. I think the issue comes with it going from

Speaker 2 so like say Google

Speaker 2 Google this Google RCS texting to iPhones is it encrypted? RCS texting to iMessage is it encrypted?

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure it's not. I might be wrong.

Speaker 1 I don't think I am.

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure I read that. And the problem was they won't let any other phone use the iMessage protocol.
And they had a company that was doing it called Beeper.

Speaker 2 And they were doing it through some sort of workaround.

Speaker 1 It's not encrypted. Yeah, it's not encrypted.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's not.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you are getting the ability to send high-resolution images, which is great.

Speaker 2 Because, you know, like my friend Brian, who used an Android, he'd send me a video, and it'd be this tiny little broken-down box because, you know, you had to break it down to the lowest resolution.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, I mean, group chats, when you have a bunch of people in iMessage, and then one person is an Android, are terrible.
I I mean, that's we get a ton of people.

Speaker 2 People get mad at you?

Speaker 1 Because you only use it. I use WhatsApp.

Speaker 1 I use WhatsApp. You only use that.

Speaker 1 I only communicate with a few people over SMS.

Speaker 1 But basically,

Speaker 1 I build a lot of leading messaging services, so I've got to use ours. Most people, I'm either WhatsApp or Instagram Direct or a Messenger.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 So I think it's maybe

Speaker 1 people are less likely to get mad at me for asking them to use WhatsApp because

Speaker 1 we make WhatsApp.

Speaker 2 When Tucker Carlson was about to interview Vladimir Putin, one of the things that was really disturbing was they contacted him and said they read his signal messages and they knew that he was going to interview Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 2 And he was like, what the fuck? Who did?

Speaker 2 The government. The U.S.? Yes, U.S.
government. I forget what it was.
Was it the CIA or was it the FBI? Wow. I forget who it was.

Speaker 2 And he was like, I didn't even know you could do that.

Speaker 1 Well, there are multiple vulnerabilities in all this stuff.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's unclear if they, I doubt that what they did was they broke Signal, because that encryption, I think, is pretty good, as is WhatsApp.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's basically Signal and WhatsApp use the same encryption. It's an open source and like it's a NSA.

Speaker 2 NSA.

Speaker 1 Okay. But

Speaker 1 someone could...

Speaker 1 break into your phone and see everything that's on your phone. But the thing that encryption does that's really good is it makes it so that the company that's running the service doesn't see it.

Speaker 1 So if you're using WhatsApp, basically, when I text you on WhatsApp, there's no point at which the meta servers see the contents of that message.

Speaker 1 Unless like, you know, we took a photo of it or shared that back to meta in some other way.

Speaker 1 That basically, it cuts out the company completely from it, which is, I think, really important for a bunch of reasons. One is people might not trust the company, but also just security issues, right?

Speaker 1 Like, let's say someone hacks into meta, which, you know, we try really hard to make it so that they can't, and we haven't had many issues with that over the 20 years of running the company.

Speaker 1 But in theory, if someone did, then they'd be able to access everyone's messages if it weren't encrypted. But because it's encrypted, there's just nothing there, right?

Speaker 1 It's like, I mean, they can't hack into meta and then get access to your messages. So now, someone like the NSA or CIA would have to kind of hack into your phone, which,

Speaker 1 you know, there are probably ways to do that. Pegasus.
I mean, there are probably a bunch of ways. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's probably ways we don't know of.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then, of course, there's always the ultimate kind of physical part of it, which is if you have access to the computer, you can usually just break in.
Right.

Speaker 1 So that's why, you know, if the FBI

Speaker 1 arrests you and takes your phone, they're probably going to be able to get in and see what's there.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 WhatsApp is encrypted, but if someone has something like Pegasus, what they do is have access to your phone. So, it doesn't matter if anything's encrypted.
They can just see it in plain sight.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I mean, this is one of the reasons why we put disappearing messages in, too.

Speaker 1 Because that way, I mean, yeah, if someone has compromised your phone and they can see everything that's going on there, then obviously they can see stuff as it comes in.

Speaker 1 But I kind of in general just,

Speaker 1 you know, think we should keep around as little of that stuff as possible. So there are some threads where it's like there's photos that get shared, you want the photos.

Speaker 1 But I think for a lot of threads, a lot of people just, you know,

Speaker 1 wouldn't be,

Speaker 1 I don't think most people would miss it if most of the contents of their threads just disappeared after seven days. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, what I find is I don't use it that much because we have this like corporate policy at Meta that we need to retain all our documents and messages and stuff. But

Speaker 1 before we had that,

Speaker 1 I used it as we were developing this. And every once in a while, I would miss something and say, wow, I kind of wish I could go back and see that.
But it was very rare.

Speaker 1 I think most communication, it's kind of like you just have the communication and then you're done.

Speaker 1 So having it be encrypted and disappearing, I think is a pretty good kind of standard of security and privacy.

Speaker 2 And you can set that disappearing time on WhatsApp, right? You can make it one day if you want.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can do one day. You could do seven days.
um

Speaker 1 and you can also set it across all your threads so you can have a default timer so that way as new threads get created your default timer just becomes the default for all those threads so i think that that's a it's a really good feature i mean i basically think whatsapp and signal are probably the two most secure that are out there um on that and of those two i think whatsapp is just used by a lot more people so i think it's it's just generally you know i mean i would say this because it's it's it's our product but i do think it's it's the better product But I think WhatsApp and Signal are basically the two most secure ones.

Speaker 2 What was your take on that guy getting arrested as the CEO of Telegram?

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 1 That's kind of a crazy one, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 it's always a little difficult to weigh in on these situations without knowing all the specifics. But one of the government tactics that I've seen that I think is pretty

Speaker 1 is not great is an increasing number of governments when they like have an issue with something that a company is doing

Speaker 1 basically just like threaten to throw the executives of that company in prison and

Speaker 1 it's like

Speaker 1 I think that that's just a really weird precedent to set right it's like it's if if the

Speaker 1 you know you have all the so it's like we're operating in all these different countries and then like

Speaker 1 you have all these governments that are basically like, if you,

Speaker 1 I don't know, we're going to like put out an interpoll notice to like get you arrested because you're not doing the thing that we want. It's like, I don't know.
I don't, I think that's like not great.

Speaker 1 I think you want the,

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously you don't want people to just be like flagrantly violating the laws, but like there are laws in different countries that we disagree with, right?

Speaker 1 So for example, there was a point at which

Speaker 1 I think I was, someone was trying to get me sentenced to death in Pakistan because they thought that, oh, because someone on Facebook had a picture of where they had the drawing of the prophet Muhammad, and someone said that that's blasphemy in our culture.

Speaker 1 And they brought a, they basically like sued me and they opened this criminal proceeding. And I don't know exactly where it went because I'm just not planning on going to Pakistan.

Speaker 1 So I was not that worried about it. But, but, like,

Speaker 1 but but it was a little bit disconcerting. It was like, all right, fine.
Like these guys are like trying to like, like, kill you. Okay, it's not great, right? You know, it's kind of like not, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's, I feel like I, yeah, it's like flying over that region. You don't want your plane to like go down above Pakistan if that thing goes through.
But

Speaker 1 that one was sort of avoidable. But the point is, like,

Speaker 1 there are all these places around the world that just have different values, right?

Speaker 1 That go against our free expression values and want us to crack down and ban way more stuff than I think a lot of people that we would believe is like the right thing to do.

Speaker 1 And to have those governments be able to exert the power of saying, okay, we're going to throw you in prison, is

Speaker 1 that's a lot of force. So I think it's generally, yeah, I think that this is one of the things that the U.S.
government is probably going to need to help defend the American tech companies for abroad.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I can't weigh in that much on the Durav specific thing because I don't know what was going on there.

Speaker 2 You know, when you were dealing with the government trying to interfere with Facebook,

Speaker 2 how much of a fear was there that they were going to get away with it and that this was going to be the future of communication online?

Speaker 2 That it was going to, that they were going to be successful with all this, that they would push these things through somehow or another, especially if a even less tolerant administration got into power.

Speaker 2 They would change laws and they would do things to make it possible.

Speaker 2 How much did that concern you?

Speaker 1 Well, we basically just reached a point where we pushed back on all this stuff.

Speaker 1 So they were pushing us to censor stuff.

Speaker 1 We were unwilling to do it. We developed a very adversarial and bad relationship with our own government, which I think is just not healthy because I think it's,

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 in theory, I think, you know, it would be good if the American industry had a positive relationship with the American government.

Speaker 1 But then what that happened is then the kind of U.S. government was going after us in all these ways.
But fortunately, in the U.S., you know, we have good rule of law.

Speaker 1 So, our view is at the end of the day, okay, these invest these agencies can open up investigations and we'll just defend ourselves.

Speaker 1 We'll go to court and we'll win all the cases because we're, you know, we follow the rules. And

Speaker 1 so, I think it ends up being

Speaker 1 a big kind of political issue where it's like

Speaker 1 it would just be you could get a lot more done if the government were helping American companies rather than kind of slowing you down at every step along the way.

Speaker 1 It makes you a little afraid that if you ever actually mess something up, that they're really going to bring the hammer down on you if you don't have a constructive relationship. But

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's mostly, I mean, going back to the AI conversation, it's like, I just think like we should all want the American companies to win at this, right?

Speaker 1 It's like this is like a huge geopolitical competition and like China's running at it super hard. And like we should want the American companies and the American standard to win.

Speaker 1 And like if there's going to be an open source model that everyone uses, like we should want it to be an American model.

Speaker 1 It's like the, there's this great Chinese model that just came out, this company DeepSeek. They're doing really good work.

Speaker 1 It's a very advanced model. And if you ask it for any negative opinions about Xi Jinping, it will not give you anything.
If you ask it if Tian Minh Square happened, it will deny it.

Speaker 1 So I think that there are like all these things where we

Speaker 1 we should want the American model to win. But like at every step along the way,

Speaker 1 if the government is sort of making that harder rather than easier, then that's

Speaker 1 I don't know. I mean, there's there's an extent to which, okay, the American tech industry is leading, so maybe the government can like

Speaker 1 get in the way a little bit and maybe the the American industry will still lead. But I don't know.
I think it's getting really competitive.

Speaker 1 And I think it's easy for the government to take for granted that the U.S. will lead on all these things when I think it's a very close competition, and we need the help.

Speaker 1 We need them to not kind of like

Speaker 1 be a force that's helping us to do these things.

Speaker 2 I completely agree.

Speaker 2 But I think that people with their own self-interest, when they're in power and they realize that these new technologies like Instagram and Facebook, that they are interfering with their ability to administer propaganda or that their

Speaker 2 ability to control the narrative.

Speaker 2 That's where they get short-sighted.

Speaker 2 And that's when they act in their own personal interest and not in the interest of neither national security or the future of the United States in terms of our ability to stay technologically ahead.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, and some of this is just, you know, if you go back to the COVID example,

Speaker 1 I think in that case, they were doing something. Their goal of trying to get everyone to get vaccinated was actually, I think, a good goal.

Speaker 2 It was a good goal if it worked. If it was real.

Speaker 2 Like if it was a sterilizing vaccine, if it really did prevent people from getting COVID, if it really did prevent people from infecting others or transmitting it. But it didn't.

Speaker 2 Well, it wasn't a good deal because it wasn't based on real data.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but also, but even if it were, right? It's like, if, I mean,

Speaker 1 I think that still on balance,

Speaker 1 knowing everything that we know now, I still think it's good for more people to get the vaccine.

Speaker 1 But the government still needs to play by the rules in terms of, you know, not like you can't just suppress true things in order to make your case. So

Speaker 1 that's kind of my

Speaker 1 view on it.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure in that case how much of it was like a personal political gain that they were going for. I think that they had a kind of goal that they thought was in the interests of the country.

Speaker 1 And the way they went about it, I think, violated the law.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, there's a bunch of problems with that, right? There's the emergency use authorization that they needed in order to get this pushed through. And you can't have that

Speaker 2 with valid therapeutics being available. And so they suppressed valid therapeutics.

Speaker 2 So they're suppressing real information that would lead to people being healthy and successful in defeating this disease. And they did that so that they could have this one solution.

Speaker 2 And this was Fauci's game plan. I mean, this is the movie American Buyers Club, or Dallas Buyers Club, rather.
That's Fauci in that movie that was with the AIDS crisis.

Speaker 2 This is the exact same game plan that was played out with the COVID vaccine.

Speaker 2 They pushed one solution, this only one, suppressed all therapeutics through propaganda, through suppressing monoclonal antibodies, like all of it. And that was done, in my opinion, for profit.

Speaker 2 And they did that because it was extremely profitable. The amount of money that was made was extraordinary during that time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and but look, I mean, I feel like a bunch of the conversation is focused on

Speaker 1 tension with the American government. I guess just the point that I'd underscore is that it's important to have this working in the American government because it is like the U.S.

Speaker 1 Constitution and like our culture here is really good compared to a lot of other places. Right.
So whatever issues we think might exist here, you go to other places and it's like really extreme. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you don't even, and there it's like, you don't even necessarily have the rule of law. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 I just think that like the way that this stuff works well

Speaker 1 is,

Speaker 1 I think if

Speaker 1 there was a clearer strategy and the U.S. government understood, believe that it's good to kind of

Speaker 1 help advance this industry because it's strategically important for the country,

Speaker 1 then I think it would be good to basically push back on on stuff that's happening in other countries that's actually a lot more extreme than the stuff that's happening in the U.S.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I agree as well. Listen,

Speaker 2 is there anything else you want to talk about before we wrap this up?

Speaker 1 I think we're good? I don't know. I mean, how long have we been going for?

Speaker 2 Three hours?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, I mean, well, I feel like

Speaker 1 we touched on AI. We touched on all the augmented and virtual reality stuff.
And I think that that stuff is just going to be wild. It's wild.

Speaker 2 Your AR technology that you showed me today is very impressive. It's crazy.

Speaker 2 Lex and I were playing Pong

Speaker 2 apart from a table from each other. I was playing some crazy game where my fingers got tired because you shoot like this.

Speaker 1 Because you're using V1 of the neural interface. Yeah, no, it's like

Speaker 1 in the future it'll just be this.

Speaker 2 It was really fun, though. It's really cool.
And

Speaker 2 you see where this is all going. It's really, really fascinating stuff.
And I'm very excited about it.

Speaker 1 Did you get a chance to use the Ray-Bands and the AI in them?

Speaker 2 Yes, we did that too. And we did translate, too, where

Speaker 2 one of your co-workers was speaking to me in Spanish and it was translating it to me in my ear in real time in English, which is really interesting. Nice.
Amazing. It's really cool.

Speaker 2 And then you could also do it on the phone so you could show it to the person on the phone so you don't have to say the words.

Speaker 2 It's really fascinating stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so we're just sort of coming at it from both sides, right? It's like the Ray-Bands are like, okay.

Speaker 1 Given a good-looking pair of glasses, what's all the technology you can put into that today and still have it be just a few hundred dollars.

Speaker 1 And then the Orion thing is like, all right, we're building the kind of future thing that we want, and we're doing our best to miniaturize it.

Speaker 2 It's basically like still pretty small.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, just thicker glasses. Yeah, and I think we want it to be a little smaller.
We need it to be a lot cheaper. Each pair right now costs more than $10,000 to make.

Speaker 1 And you're not going to have a successful consumer product at that. So we have to miniaturize it more.

Speaker 1 But I mean, the amount of stuff that we put in there from it's like effectively what would have been considered a supercomputer like 10 or 20 years ago plus you know lasers in the arms and the like nano etchings on the on the lens to be able to to see it and then the microphone and the speaker and the wi-fi to be able to connect with the other it's just like like the wild amount of technology to kind of miniaturize into something that one's really fun we've been working on that for 10 years um

Speaker 1 but yeah no i think i think between that the glasses um all the AI stuff

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 yeah all the social media stuff yeah no I I mean, I think we covered it.

Speaker 2 And I'm very excited about this new stance that you guys are taking. I think the community notes thing is a brilliant idea that X has implemented.
And

Speaker 2 I am really glad that you guys are implementing it too. I think it's the way.
And the way, generally, I think we both agree is that people have to have the ability to communicate.

Speaker 2 They have to have the ability to express themselves. And that's how we find out what's real and what's not.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think the more voice is the answer on this.
Yes. Yes, sir.
And I think after

Speaker 1 after sort of a long journey, I'm glad to be able to take it back to the roots. And I feel like we're more fortified now in the position.

Speaker 2 Well, I think one of the lessons that people have learned over the last few years with the suppression of information is that that's not good.

Speaker 2 And there's a giant percentage of the population that feels that way. And even people that are progressive and liberals

Speaker 2 were on the side of the people that were pushing the the suppression of information still don't think it's right.

Speaker 2 I think most people generally believe in the First Amendment in this country, and we realize how valuable it is to have the freedom of expression.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Anyway, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 Bye, everybody.