#2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
en
January 10, 2025
TLDR: Mark Zuckerberg leads Meta Platforms Inc., encompassing Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. This includes devices like Meta Quest and smart glasses such as Ray-Ban Meta.

In episode #2255 of the podcast, Joe Rogan welcomes Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., discussing the company’s responsibility regarding content moderation across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The conversation centers on the nuances of free speech, the impact of government regulations on social media, and the evolution of censorship in the digital age.
Embracing Free Speech
Zuckerberg emphasizes the founding mission of Meta to give people a voice. The discussion delves into the early years of Facebook, where minimal content policies were in place, focusing instead on empowering user expression. However, he argues that societal shifts over the past decade have led to a marked increase in ideological-based censorship, particularly influenced by significant events:
- 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Heightened awareness around misinformation, initially framed by media narratives concerning Russian interference.
- COVID-19 Pandemic: The urgency to control information in a public health crisis resulted in pressures for ideological censorship, leading to a slippery slope of moderation practices.
The Slippery Slope of Moderation
Zuckerberg reflects on the challenges faced when prospective misinformation labeled some true statements as dangerous. He suggests that too much deference was given to media narratives, which ultimately undermined trust in platforms.
- Censorship and Trust Issues: Increasing mistrust arose due to perceived biases in third-party fact-checking. Users felt that the checks often favored a specific ideological perspective, leading to a decline in overall trust in social media platforms.
The Role of Government Pressure
The conversation transitions to the influence of government requests on content moderation:
- Zuckerberg cites specific instances where government officials pressured Meta to censor legitimate information about vaccine side effects during the COVID-19 response. He emphasizes the standpoint that true information should not be suppressed despite government directives.
- The experiences highlighted the fine line that social media companies must walk between regulatory compliance and upholding free speech.
Content Moderation Challenges
Zuckerberg acknowledges the sheer scale of moderating content on a platform used by billions:
- With over 3.2 billion users across its services, it is logistically impossible to monitor content effectively without automated systems.
- He addresses ongoing challenges in balancing necessary moderation with the potential for overreach that stifles free expression.
Looking Forward: Policy Changes
Reflecting on past moderation practices, Zuckerberg indicates that Meta is revising its approach:
- The introduction of community notes to replace third-party fact-checking aims to democratize content moderation decisions, allowing users to weigh in on the veracity of information.
- Meta hopes to restore trust by implementing transparency and empowering user decision-making processes.
Navigating the Future with AI
As the discussion shifts towards future innovations, Zuckerberg explores the implications of AI and virtual reality technology for social engagement and information sharing, emphasizing the potential for AI to foster creativity:
- AI could amplify human creativity and reduce the need for menial labor, transforming job landscapes in unprecedented ways.
- He envisions social media evolving into a highly interactive experience, seamlessly blending physical and virtual interactions, which could reshape how people communicate and share information.
Conclusion
In summation, Zuckerberg’s insights underscore a pivotal moment for Meta as it reassesses its policies on free speech amid growing scrutiny over content moderation practices. The evolution of technology may serve as an essential tool for enhancing communication and fostering a freer digital environment, but only if handled responsibly, ensuring a balance between regulation and user empowerment.
Zuckerberg’s remarks reveal a commitment to returning to the roots of free expression and learning from past mistakes to create a more transparent, user-centered platform.
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Alright bro, what's happening? Good to see you. You too? What's going on?
You know, chill week. Yeah. Sort of. This recent announcement that you did about content moderation, how has that been received? Probably depends on who you ask. Right. But you know, but look, I mean,
I've been working on this for a long time. You got to do what you think is right. We've been on a long journey here. I think at some level, you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice. The whole point of social media is basically giving people the ability to share what they want.
And, you know, it goes back to, you know, our original mission is just give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
What do you think started the pathway towards increasing censorship? Because clearly, we were going in that direction for the last few years. It seemed like we really found out about it when Elon bought Twitter, and we got the Twitter files. And when you came on here, and when you 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 so it's these kind of conversations like when did all that start yeah well
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. You know, I wasn't too deep on our content policies for like the first 10 years of the company. 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? So if someone's getting bullied, for example, we deal with that or we put in place systems to fight bullying.
If someone is saying, hey, someone's pirating copyrighted content on the service, it's like, OK, we'll build controls to make it so we'll find IP protected content.
But it was really in the last 10 years that people started pushing for like ideological-based censorship. And I think it was two main events that really triggered this. In 2016, there was the election of President Trump also coincided with basically Brexit and the EU and sort of the fragmentation of the EU.
And then in 2020, there was COVID. And I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time, we just face this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds.
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? Yeah, and this is the thing. The time I was really sort of ill-prepared to kind of parse what was going on, right? I think part of my reflection looking back on this is I kind of think in 2016, in the aftermath,
I gave too much deference to 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? It has to be that there's this kind of massive
misinformation out there. Some of it started with the Russia collusion stuff, but it kind of morphed into different things over time. It was so ideologically polarizing, right? People didn't want to believe that anybody looked at him and said this should be our president.
Yeah, so I took this and just kind of assumed that everyone was acting in good faith. And I said, OK, well, there are concerns about misinformation. We should, just like when people raised other concerns in the past, and we try to deal with them,
Okay, yeah, people know, you 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. But I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world, right? That's like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service. And so we tried to put in place a system that would deal with it.
And early on, tried to basically make it so that it was really limited. We're like, all right, we're just going to have this system where these third party fact checkers and they can check the worst of the worst stuff. So things that are very clear hoaxes that it's not like we're not parsing speech about whether something is slightly true or slightly false, like Earth is flat, things like that. So that was sort of the original intent.
We put in place the system and it just sort of veered from there. 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. So they're just kind of veered in that direction. And 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 is into like,
judge people's opinions, it's to provide in this layer to help fact check some of the stuff that seems the most extreme. But it was just never accepted by people broadly. I think people just felt like the fact checkers were too biased.
not necessarily even so much and 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 in fact check in the first time in the first place. So I kind of think like after having gone through that whole exercise, it
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. 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. And I guess it was probably about a few years that I really started coming to the conclusion that we were gonna need to change something about that. COVID was the other big one where
That was also very tricky because, you know,
The beginning it was, it's like a legitimate public health crisis in the beginning. Even people who are the most ardent First Amendment 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,
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 of COVID. It seemed like, OK, you have this virus. It seems like it's killing a lot of people. I don't know. We didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be. So at the beginning, it kind of seemed like OK.
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 two weeks to flat in the curve to, in the beginning, it was like, OK, there aren't enough masks. Masks aren't that important to them. It's like, oh, no, you have to wear a mask. And everything was shifting around. It should become very difficult to follow. And this really hit
the most extreme, I'd say during, it was during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. And now I'm generally like pretty pro rolling out vaccines. I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative, but
I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it. They pushed us super hard to take down things that were true. They basically pushed us and said, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects,
you basically need to take down. And I was just like, well, we're not going to do that. We're clearly not going to do that. I mean, that is kind of inarguably true. Who is they? Who's telling you to take down things that have to talk about vaccine side effects? It was people in the Biden administration. I think it was, I wasn't involved in those conversations directly, but I think it was. How difficult is that to not be involved in those conversations directly?
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That's got to be strange too, right? 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. Like what is, well, what's a Facebook? How many people use it on a daily basis? Forget about how many overall, like how many people use it regularly? It's 3.2 billion people use one of our services every day.
Yeah, no, it's wild. More than a third of the planet. That's so crazy. And it's almost half of Earth. Well, on a monthly basis, it is probably half of Earth. I want to say that, though, there's a lot of hypercritical people that are conspiracy theorists and think that everybody is a part of some cabal to control them. I want you to understand that whether it's YouTube or whatever place that you think is doing something that's awful,
It's good that you speak because this is how things get changed and this is how people find out that people are upset about content moderation and in censorship. But moderating at scale is insane. It's insane. What we were talking the other day about the number of videos that go up every hour on YouTube and it's
It's bananas. It's bananas. To try to get a human being that is reasonable, logical, and objective, that's going to analyze every video, it's virtually impossible. It's not possible. So you've got to use a bunch of tools, you've got to get a bunch of things wrong, and you have also people reporting things. And how much is that? It can affect things.
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. Get it taken down. There's so much going on. I want to put that in people's heads before we go on. Understand the kind of numbers that we're talking about here.
Now understand you have 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're saying what you're saying. They were trying to get you to take down vaccine side effects, which is just crazy.
Yeah, so, I mean, like you're saying, I mean, this is, 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. AI, it glasses like the future of social media, all that stuff. So, I get involved in this stuff, but in general, we have a policy team, there are people I trust there, the people are kind of working on this on a day-to-day basis. And the interactions that,
that I was just referring to. I mean, a lot of this is documented, I mean, because, you know, Jim Jordan and the house had this whole investigation and committee into 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 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. Did you record any of those phone calls? No, I don't think we were. But I think, I want to listen. I mean, there are emails. The emails are published. It's all kind of out there. And they're like,
And basically it just got to this point where we were like, no, we're not gonna, we're not gonna 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, you know, you're gonna see an ad that says, okay, if you took a COVID vaccine, you're eligible, you know, like for this kind of payment, like 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. We're not going to take down things that are, that are true. And then at some point, um, I guess, uh, I don't have flipped a bit. I mean, Biden, when he was, he gave some statement at some point, I don't know if his press conference or to some journalists were basically was like, these guys are killing people. And, and, um, and,
I don't know. Then all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal. It was brutal. Wow. Yeah. It's just that massive overstepping. Yeah. And also you weren't killing people. This is the thing about all 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.
Regardless, put that aside, metabolic health is of the utmost importance in your everyday life. Whether there's a pandemic or there's not, 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, and they were suppressing all that information.
And that's just crazy. 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. 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% of people survive. This is a crazy overstep, but scared the shit out of a lot of people to red pill as it were a lot of people because they realize like, oh,
1984 is like an instruction manual. It shows you how things can go that way with wrong speak and with bizarre distortion of facts. And when it comes down to it, in today's day and age, the way people get information is through your platform, through X. This is how people are getting information. They're getting information from YouTube. They're getting information from a bunch of different sources now.
And you can't censor that if it's real legitimate information because it's not ideologically convenient for you. Yeah. So, I mean, that's basically the journey that I've been on, right? Started off very pro free speech, free expression. Um, you know, and then over the last 10 years, there were these two big episodes. 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.
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 the experience that a lot of people have had is, okay, the stuff that's being written about is not kind of all accurate. And even if the facts are right, it's kind of written from a slant a lot of the time. And then...
And then there was the government version of it, which is during COVID, which is OK. Our government is telling us that we need to censor true things. This is a disaster. And it's not just the US. I think a lot of people in the US
focus on this as an American phenomenon. But I kind of think that the reaction to COVID probably caused a breakdown and trust in a lot of governments around the world, because I mean, you know, 2024 was a big election year around the world. And, you know, there are all these countries, India, just like a ton of countries that had elections. And the incumbents basically lost every single one.
Um, so there is some sort of a global phenomenon where the, the, um, whether it was because of inflation, because of the, the economic policies to deal with, um, with COVID or, or just how, how the government's dealt with COVID.
seems to have had this effect that's global, not just the US, but like a very broad decrease in trust, at least in that set of incumbents and maybe in sort of these democratic institutions overall. 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.
I think that that's just increasingly true. And my view at this point is like, all right, we start off focused on free expression. We kind of had this pressure tested over the last period. I feel like I just have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be. And this is how it's going to be going forward.
And so at this point, I think a lot of people look at this as a purely political thing, because they look at the timing and they're like, hey, well, you're doing this right after the election. It's like, OK, I try not to change our content rules right in the middle of an election either. There's not a great time to do this. And you want to do it a year later.
Yeah, it's like there's no good time to do it. Right. And whatever time is going on, there's going to be, you know, so 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? And we try to have policies that reflect, you know, mainstream discourse. But
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. 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 10 years with like these huge institutions just pressuring us. And I feel like this is kind of the right place to be going forward.
What was it like when they were attacking you? First of all, what was the premise? What were they saying was your offense? Was it that you were allowing information that was not true, that was getting out there? I know there was also, they're saying that you guys were allowing hate groups to speak. There was a lot of this. The tough thing with politics is that there's like
Well, when you say someone's coming after you, you're referring to kind of the government and the estations. I mean, so the issue is that there's the, there's what specific thing an agency might be looking into you for. 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. So, and we had organizations
that we're looking into us that we're like not really involved with social media like the CFPB like this, um, financial, I don't even know what it stands for. It's the, it's the financial organization, um, that Elizabeth Warren had set up. Oh, great. And, and it's basically, it's like, we're not a bank. The banking.
good sex. Yeah, so we're not a bank, right? It's like, what does meta have to do with this? But they kind of found some theory that they wanted to investigate, and it's like, okay, clearly they were trying really hard, right, to like find some theory, but it like, I don't know, just it kind of like throughout the
the the the party in the government there's just sort of i don't know if it's i don't know how this stuff works and i've never been government 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 to punish them but uh... but it's uh...
It's tough to be at the other end of that. Well, it's not good. The thing that I think is actually the toughest, though, is it's global. 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. So we talk about a lot, okay, what is the experience of, okay, if the US government comes after you? I think the real issue is that when the US government does that to its tech industry.
Um, it's basically just open season around the rest of the world. Right. I mean, the, 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. So when you, when you think about it, like, okay, there's, it's like,
You know, $100 million here, a couple billion dollars there. 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 US government basically gets to decide how are they going to deal with that, right? Because if the US government, if some other country was screwing with another industry that we cared about, the US government would probably find some way to put pressure on them.
But I think what happened here is actually the complete opposite. The US government led the kind of attack against the companies, which then just made it like the EU is basically in all these other places, just free to just go to town on all the American companies and do whatever you want. But I mean, look, obviously, I don't want to come across as if like, we don't have things that we need to do better. Obviously, we do. And when we mess something up, we deserve to be held accountable for that and just like everyone else.
I do think that the American technology industry is a bright spot in the American economy. 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 US's strategy going forward to defend that. And it's one of the things that I'm optimistic about with President Trump is I think he just wants America to win. And I think some of the other governments who are kind of pushing on this stuff,
You know, at least the US has the rule of law, right? 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. And when we've chosen to do that, basically we have a pretty good rate of winning.
It's just not like that in every other country around the world. If other governments decide that they're going to go after you, you don't always get a clear shake at defending yourself on the rules. I think to some degree, if the US tech industry is going to continue being really strong,
I do think that the U.S. government has a role in basically defending it abroad, and that's one of the things that I'm optimistic about will happen in this administration. Well, I think this is administration uniquely has felt the impact of not being able to have free speech.
because this was the, this is the administration where Trump was famously kicked off of Twitter. That was a huge issue. Like after January 6th, like they removed the, 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.
So, for him, without free speech, without people, 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. The majority of the television entities and print entities were against him, the majority of them.
So if without social media, without podcast, they don't stand a chance. So they're uniquely aware of the importance of giving people their voice, free speech. 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?
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. 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. They can mark stuff false. And then we would downright get in the algorithm. I think what
What Twitter and X have done with community notes, I think it's just a better program. Rather than having a small number of fact checkers, you get the whole community to weigh in 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 there's actually a broad consensus on this and then you show it. And you're showing more information, not less. So you're not using the fact check as a signal
to show less you're using the community note to provide real context and show additional information. So I think that that's better.
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. So you get like whether it's like China or Russia or Iran or like one 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, it's like, wow, a bunch of people must think this or something. 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. And when we find that, that there's like some bot that's operating an account. How do you differentiate? How do you figure that out?
It just, I mean, there are some things that a person just would never do. Right. So, um, have you met Lex Friedman? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He might not be. Well, but is he going to pass your turn test? Yeah, no, is he going to take him? Is he going to make a million actions in a minute? It's like, yeah, yeah, probably not.
Okay, so that is things that aren't possible in that. I think these guys are pretty sophisticated and it's an adversarial space. So we find some technique and then they basically kind of update their techniques. But we have a team of, it's effectively like counterintelligence folks, counterterrorism 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 and then sometimes you trace it down and sometimes you get some tips from different intelligence agencies and then you can kind of piece together over time. 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.
But how are you sure? Is there a 100% certainty that you are definitely getting a group of people that are bad actors? Or is it just people that have unpopular opinions? No, I don't think it's that for this. I think...
But what I'm saying is how do you determine? How do you, at 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?
Yes, I think for the specific problem around these large coordinated groups doing election interference or something, it's a large enough group. We have a bunch of people analyzing it. It's like they study it for a while. I think we're probably pretty accurate on that. 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. 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. The removing the fact checkers and replacing them with community notes, I think it's a good step forward. A very small percent of content is fact checked in the first place, so is that going to make the hugest difference? I'm not sure. I think it'll be a positive step though.
Um, and we, 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. But by far the biggest set of issues we have, and, 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? 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. So we build a bunch of systems that basically go out and try to automate finding people who are who are dealing with dealing drugs. And then you basically have this question.
which is how precise do you want to set the classifier? 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? And then those correspond to amounts of
I guess that the statistics term would be recall. What percent of the bad stuff are you finding? So if you require 99% confidence, then maybe you only actually end up taking down 20% of the bad content. 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. But let's say you say, no, we really need to find everyone who is doing this bad thing. And it doesn't need to be as severe as dealing drugs. It could just be any kind of category of harmful content. You start getting to some of these classifiers might have 80%, 85% precision in order to get 90% of the bad stuff down.
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. And if you filter, if you kind of multiply that across the billions of people who use our services every day, that is
millions and millions of posts that are basically being taken down that are innocent 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. 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 required more confidence, which is this trade-off. 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.
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 deactivated because it's connected to a Facebook account. And the Facebook account is, or like I'm using on the same phone as a Facebook account where 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?
Yeah. Whether WhatsApp app got canceled as well? Yeah, because I mean, there are a bunch of... So if your Facebook app gets taken out, like I 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. If that, if you get caught for that, does your WhatsApp get killed?
Not for memes, but go back to like a very severe thing. Like let's say someone is terrorists. Let's say the most severe. Sure. Yeah. Let's say someone is like terrorist content. They're planning some attack. Right. So we take down their account, right? But then let's say that person can just go then sign up with another account. When I think like, you know, how does WhatsApp get connected to that though?
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, it's, 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. 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.
Right, if you're aware. Yeah, so if our systems think that someone is a terrorist, then you probably need to deactivate their access to all the different accounts. Yeah, they can't get on threads. Yeah, threads, Instagram, yeah.
Yeah, so that makes sense. So you can understand how you get there, but then you just get to this question around the precision and the confidence level. And then you're just making all these mistakes at scale, and it's just unacceptable.
But I think it's a very hard calculation of where do you want to be, because on the one hand, I get why people 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. But over time, the technology will get better and it'll get more precise. But at any given point in time,
That's the choice that we have to make, is do we want to make more mistakes airing on the side of just like blowing away innocent people's accounts? Or do we want to get 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. We were having a conversation yesterday, Mel Gibson and I, about how that can get weird. Was it Theo? Might have been Theo.
I think it was Theo, 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, you want to shitpost, you want to post jokes, you want to be silly, you should be able to be anonymous. I think there's nothing wrong with that.
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. But if you're going to allow anonymous accounts, you're 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. I'm sure you've seen that before. It's come up on Twitter multiple times where they've found hundreds of sock puppet accounts tweeting the exact same thing. So you've literally word for word, even certain words and caps, like either keep people or copy or pasting it or there's an email campaign that's getting legitimate people to do it or these are fake people. 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 important things that the general public needs to know about, especially whistleblower type stuff, you have to have some ability to be anonymous. But you're all, 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.
Yeah. Um, a lot of what we've seen too. I mean, so there's the anonymous accounts 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 what's up groups? Um, private groups on, on Facebook.
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're using. Now, 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. And then most of the jokes that I make are like with my friends in WhatsApp and groups. So yeah, I think that's kind of where the world is more broadly now.
Yeah. 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. I think everyone does. For sure. Yeah. Which is just a weird thing about taking things out of context, particularly
on social media where people love to do that. But there is this problem of like, 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. And it just muddies the water of reality for a lot of people.
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 most categories of bad stuff that we're policing, everyone agrees is bad. No one's sitting there defending that terrorism is good, whether child exploitation or drugs or IP violations or people inciting violence. It's like most of the stuff is bad. People clearly believe that
that election interference and foreign government manipulation of content is bad. 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. 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? You may just not like my opinion on something, and then people think it's false, but that one's really tricky. And the other one is basically what people refer to as hate speech.
which is, I think, also comes from a good place of wanting to crack down on that, of wanting to promote more inclusion and belonging and people feeling good and having a pluralistic society that can
But they can basically have all these different communities coexist. Except everyone. But I think the problem is, is that all these things are on a spectrum. And when you go too far on them, 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. So Pete Hegseth is going to probably be defending his nomination for Secretary of Defense on the Senate floor.
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. 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. And so, and it's like, okay, like on its face, yeah, calling for the exclusion of a protected category, that seems like that's, okay, there's like legal protections, there's all the 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.
Yeah. So I think some of the stuff I think well-intentioned 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.
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 that we need to go after it, 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 and at what point would people rather us
kind of say, okay, I'm not sure that that one is causing an issue. So on balance, maybe we should just leave that person's account out because the pain of just nuking someone's account when you're not sure or you make a mistake is like, that's pretty real too.
Yeah, very, very complicated. Yeah. It's all very nuanced. And you know, you made a point earlier about the government supporting its companies, that it would be a good thing for the government to support its companies. It makes sense. 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.
There's never been a thing like Facebook before. There's never been a thing like Twitter before X. There's never been a thing like Instagram. These are new things in terms of the impact that it has on society, on opinions, on conversations, on distribution of information. There's never been a thing like this that the government didn't control. 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. I mean, there has been CIA operatives that have been in major newspapers forever. There's always been that. 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. 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.
So, well, what do they trust? They trust social media. Well, who's running that? Well, a bunch of people figured it out and invented it. Well, then fuck that. Like, we got to crack down on that. 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 100 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 this is like this new 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. They had CBS, they had NBC, when they had the New York Times and all these Washington Post, when they were in control of narratives in that way, it was so much easier.
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. 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. And that's a completely new thing that probably led to Trump getting elected.
Yeah, I mean, the causality there is tricky, but because there's a lot of things. I mean, it's a lot without it. He probably doesn't get elected. It's yeah, it's tough to know. I mean, I do come back to this point that there were every major incumbent lost their elections around the world. But I think that's also it might be it might be because of that revealing how how kind of
incorrect and dishonest, I think some of these governments were. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that that's quite possible. And I mean, I do think that there is this cycle that goes on where within a society, it's not just the government that has power. There's like certain people who are in these like culturally elite positions and journalists, TV news anchors, like who are the people who people broadly trust, right? They're not all in government. They're like,
a lot of a lot of people in other positions. It's like who are the people that that basically people look to and.
I think that's basically it needs to shift for the internet age. And I think a lot of the people who people looked to before, they're kind of realizing, hey, they weren't super honest about a lot of these issues that we face. And that's partially why social media isn't a monolithic thing. 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. 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. And I think that that's a thing that is maybe it's possible because of social media. 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.
And I don't know to what extent you feel like you got to be large because of social media or just the podcasting platforms that you used. But I think that this is a very big sea change in terms of who are the voices that matter. And what we do is we try to build a platform that gives people a voice. But I think that there's this wholesale generational shift
And 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 think that that's like what is what's going on here. It's not it's not just the government. And people saying, hey, we want like a very big change here. I think it's just like a wholesale shift in saying, we just want different people who we actually trust, who are actually going to like tell us the truth and like,
and not give us the bullshit opinions that you're supposed to say, but the type of stuff that I would actually, when I'm sitting in my living room with my friends, the stuff that we know is true. Who are the people who have the courage to actually just say that stuff? I don't know. I think that whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.
Yeah. The problem is these people that are starting these jobs, they're coming out of universities and in the universities they're indoctrinated into these ideas as well. 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 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 argument for anonymous accounts. I think you should have anonymous accounts.
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. And you should be able to post facts and information and what you've learned. And anecdotal experiences of people in your family that have vaccine side effects and not worry about losing your job, which people were worried about, which is so crazy. And you're seeing
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, so they're like gaslighting during podcasts, and people are like, hey, fuckface. You can't do that here, it doesn't work.
Yeah, it's a new medium. I mean, I'm sure you know the history on this. It's like when people transition from radio to TV, the initial TV anchors were the same radio people, but just like being filmed while speaking on the radio, 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. It's like, you know, the whole phrase, it's like, you've got a good radio voice, right?
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 I think that that's going to be true for the Internet too. It's not as cut, or I think part of it is the format, right? The fact that you do these like two, three-hour episodes, I mean,
I hated doing TV because I basically got started. I started Facebook when I was 19 and I was good at some things very bad at others. I was good at coding and real bad at talking to people and explaining what I was doing. I just had these experiences early on where
I'd go on TV, and it wouldn't go well, and they'd cut it down to some random sound bite, and I'd look stupid. And then basically, I'd get super nervous about going on TV, because I knew that they were just going to cut it in some way that it was going to look like a fucking idiot. And so I'm just like, this sucks, right? So I just like,
It's kind of a funny thing. In some ways, it's like, okay, at the same time, I was gaining confidence, being able to build more and more complicated products. And it's even as an early 20s person, I was like, I could do this. And then on the TV and comms public side, I was like, this is a disaster. Every time I go out, it's worse and worse and worse. But it's one of the reasons why I think on the internet,
There's no reason to cut it to a four-minute soundbite conversation. Part of what makes it authentic is these are complex issues. We can unpack it for hours and probably still have hours more stuff to talk about. I don't know. It's just more real. Yeah, it's definitely that. 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. So you really can't get into depth. Even Bill Marshall is only an hour. You have all these people talking over each other, then you sit down with one person for a short amount of time. It's just not enough time.
for important subjects. It's also a lot of them for whatever reason want to do in front of an audience, which is the worst way to get people to talk. Imagine these disasters that you had if there was like 5,000 people staring at you in a TV crowd as well. So that added element, which is so not normal.
and not conducive to having a conversation when you're talking about nuanced things. Where you have to think, you have to be able to pause and not concern yourself being entertaining from these fucking people just sitting there staring at you.
Yeah, and also when you're having a conversation, I don't know, it's like when you start talking about something, you're kind of subconscious kicks in, you start thinking about the topic. So it's like you might not actually have the thing that you want to say until like five minutes later. 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 okay, kind of like downloading into my memory, like how am I going to like, you know, it's like, how am I going to, you know, just explain these different
But yeah, I just think that that's sort of how people work. What's also like it's conversations are like a dance. You know, one person can't be dancing at another speed and the other person is going slow. 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. 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.
You know, they probably don't even know a lot about climate change. They probably don't really understand too much about what space space X is trying to accomplish, but they're just reporting on it. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of the people I've met there. I think are good people. It's just a tough format. It's a terrible format. 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. And now I'm supposed to believe you're one of the good guys. You're one of the straight shooters now. Yeah.
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 to have
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 limitation, censorship, government overreach. If anybody saw it, look, there's, I don't know what the actual impact of the Hunter Biden laptop story would have been. I don't know.
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. If they found out the 100 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. 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 when the government gets involved in what could be termed election interference, but through some weird loophole, it's legal, whereas some election interference that the pushing for social media companies to censor stuff was legal.
I mean, that's, I mean, there's all this stuff about what, like, people talk about the First Amendment and, okay, these tech platforms should offer free speech like the First Amendment.
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 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. So at some level, I do think that 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, it's pretty bad. It sounds illegal. I would love to hear it. I wish somebody recorded those conversations. Well, I mean, again, it's great to listen to someone who can animate them, maybe polytuned. A lot of the material is public. I mean, Jim Jordan led this whole investigation in Congress. I mean, it was basically, I think about this as like,
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. We just turned over all of the documents and everything that we had to them and they basically put together this report. The people that actually did call for censorship, what was the response to all this?
to what to the to the investigation yes i don't know did was anybody held accountable was there any i mean any repercussions and they lost the election yes that's a that's a that's a little democracy i mean that's kind of right um but if the 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? 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.
Yeah. Well, the COVID thing, I don't think it was election interference as much as it was just like government meddling where it shouldn't have. But no, I mean, it's tough for me to say, you know, like what specific retribution or justice should happen to anyone who is involved in these things. But I think your point about
let's make sure this doesn't happen again. Yeah. Is 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, okay, yeah, so we didn't take down the stuff that was true. But we did generally defer to the government on some of these policies that in retrospect, I probably wouldn't knowing what I know now.
I just think that that's sort of the journey that we've been on. We start the thing focused on free expression, go through some 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 try to reset. That's sort of the moment that we're at now.
is trying to just rationalize a bunch of the policies. 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.
I'm sure I'm not done making mistakes in the world. But I think at this point, we have a much more thorough understanding of what the space is. And I think our values and principles on this are likely going to be much more durable going forward. And I think that that's probably a good thing for the Internet.
I think it's a great 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. 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.
I have the benefit of not having to convince the board not to fire me, but it's like a normal corporate environment. 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. It's like, all right, the board doesn't pay me except for security.
And I'm not worried about losing my job because I control the majority of the voting in the company. So I actually get to use our board to 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? I just want the best entrepreneurs and people who've created different things. And Dana is this guy.
Who, I mean, he basically took the sport from being this like, I think it was viewed as like this pretty marginal thing when he got started, right? I mean, John McCain was trying to out loud and 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. It's like, I mean, what Dana's done with the UFC is like one of the most legendary business stories.
And the brand is beloved. And I think he's just, so he's like a world-class entrepreneur. And he's just like a, he's got a strong backbone. 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. And we need some strong people who are going to basically help advise us on how to handle some of these situations. Running this company is not for the faint of heart. There's definitely a lot of pressure from all these different governments. And then it's like, OK, I could spend all my time doing that, but I'm not even a politician. I just want to spend my time building things.
So it's um, so yeah, I think Dana's going to be great. He's the best, great entrepreneur. I agree with everything you said about him without him. None of the UFC would have ever taken place the way it did. I mean, you needed the Fertita 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. Eddie Bravo and I went to a live event in the nineties. I was working for the UFC as a backstage interviewer and he went there with Ricky Rocket.
You know, Ricky Rocket from Poison? No. He's a fucking black belt under the Machado's. He's legit. Super legit. Really nice guy too. Anyway, so Ricky Rocket and him were at the UFC and we were talking about it in the 90s. We're like, you know what this port needs? Because we were in love with it. But we were martial artists. We were like, the sport needs some billionaires who just throw a ton of money on it and just get it huge.
And then the Fertina brothers come along, billionaires with a ton of money who are huge fans of the sport, just love the sport. 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. And so then they buy the UFC for like two million dollars, which is
Probably the greatest purchase ever, except they were 40 plus million dollars in the hole when they financed the ultimate fighter. And then that was 2005. And then this one fight takes place with Stefan Bader and Forrest Griffin on television. It's so wild and so crazy that millions of people start tuning in. The sport's born.
And then you have Chuck Liddell, who was the champion at the time, who was the most fan-friendly champion you could ever have, just a fucking berserker, with a psychopath, with a fucking head tattoo and a mohawk, crushing people. In his prime, he was the perfect poster guy for the UFC, because he was just smashing people, and then throwing his arms back in a cage. It was nuts. I'm sure you've seen a lot of Chuck Liddell fights, right? Yeah, yeah.
It was just the whole thing took off. But without Dana, it would have never taken place. The guy's tireless. But man, I could call him up. 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. We'll talk for hours, for hours. He just wants to talk about fights. He's like so locked in, like all the time. And he's just like so driven. And now that he's healthy,
Like, oh my God, what Gary Breck has done for him is incredible. He lost all this weight, got super thin, real fit, super healthy. He doesn't fuck around with alcohol anymore. He just eats healthy food. He looks great. Now he's getting even more energy. Yeah, it's incredible. Well, we're lucky to have some of it. Yeah, we are. And you know what? We're also lucky that you got into Jiu Jitsu.
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 jujitsu guy now. It's funny. I saw your neck. I'm like, his neck's bigger. Your neck is bigger. Good. Are you using iron neck or is he just? I do like it. I do like iron neck, but, but it's, um,
But when I started training, not just jujitsu, but striking, I was like, all right, I want to find a way to do this where I don't hurt my brain. I need to, I'm going to be running this company for a while. I would like to stay healthy and not take too much damage. And so I think the number one thing you need to do is, well, in addition to having good partners is have a strong neck.
Yes, so yeah, so yeah, I take that I take that pretty seriously It's very important a strong neck is great for jujitsu as well because it's a weapon like in certain positions like head and arm jokes You need a neck. 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. Yeah 20
That's crazy. His neck is like bigger than his face. 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 he just goes straight down when he was in the champ, when he was in the tank. He's amazing. Yeah.
The next is very important, but it's also like, you know, you're doing it very smart. You're bringing in Dave Camarillo. He's awesome. Amazing. He's awesome. You're bringing all these like super talented people to train with you too, which is really important and just learn systematically. Probably the way you've learned all these other things, which is really so fascinating to me about MMA and jujitsu in particular.
is the general public has this knuckle-dragging, meat-head sort of perspective, and then I'm like, let me introduce you to Mikey Musamichi. Well, there's a range. There's a range from Mikey to... Right, but Mikey's one of the elite of the elite, and he's about as far from the... I love Mikey. He's a very good guy.
He's a super good guy. He's super kind and unbelievably brilliant and eccentric and just so dedicated to Jiu Jitsu. I'm glad that he's over at the UFC now. Yes, I am too. Well, I'm glad a guy like that exists. I like, because I'm like, OK, I know you think that. Let me show you this guy. And then I'm like, let me show you what it really is. Let me introduce you to these people because they're the nicest people.
I know. There's no better stress reliever in the world than Jujitsu or martial arts. There's no better. You leave there. You're the kindest person in the world. You just like all of your aggressions out of your system. Yeah. 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. It's not as acute. I think it's like, sometimes you have someone trying to choke you unconscious slowly over a multi-year period, and that's business. 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 had my hand down, so I got punched in the face.
Yeah, it's really important to me for balance. I basically try to train every morning. I'm either doing general fitness or MMA. I do sometimes grappling, sometimes striking, or sometimes both. It got to the point where I tore my ACL training. At that point, I didn't have
I wasn't integrated between my weight training and my fighting training, so I think I was probably overdoing it, 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 turn my ACL, first of all, everyone at the company was like, ah fuck, we're going to get so many more emails now, that he can't do this. 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 thirties at the time. And, but she was like, no, she's like, when you heal your ACLU, you better go back to fighting. And I'm like, what do you, what do you mean? 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. So, and, um, is 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 definitely takes the edge off things. It's like after a couple of hours of doing that in the morning, it's just like, yeah, it's like nothing else that day is going to stress you out that way. You can just deal with it. 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, you're not like exhausted. Um, and sometimes you get a session and you should go so hard and you, I need to like just go to sleep or something. But, um, it's also good to know that you can kill people.
It's a good thing to know. It's a good thing to know if something goes sideways. I guess there's a certain confidence from that. It's an important skill. If you could give it an appeal, if you could sell it an appeal, everybody would buy it. 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 two dollars. 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. 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. 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 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. 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, you're trying to figure out when to hit the gas and when to control position and recover. 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. You shouldn't kill people, let me be clear. 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 too, if someone's trying to kill you and they absolutely can't, because you can kill them easy. That's way better. The way better situation to be in.
Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, it's open a lot of how I think about stuff. I mean, it is just interesting. I mean, you're point about like having a pill that allows you to just kind of know that you have this kind of physical ability. It's a superpower. It's interesting because I do think a lot of our
society has become very like, 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 there's like a whole energy in this that I think it is very healthy in the right balance. I mean, I think part of the reason
One of the things that I enjoy about it is I feel like I can just express myself. It's like when you're running a company, people typically don't want to see you being this ruthless person who's just like, I'm just going to crush the people I'm competing with.
But when you're fighting, it's like, no, no, that's like, so I think it's rewarded. I think in some ways, when people see me competing in the sport, they're like, oh, no, that's the real mark. It's like, because it goes back to 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. It's like that's the real one. Well, you definitely got a lot of respect in the martial arts community. 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 like, wow, that guy's into it. Like, wow, anytime something like that happens, there's like some new person who's a prominent person, a very smart person. It's really interesting in it. We all get very excited because we're like, oh, it's a very welcoming community. Super.
I think there's a lot of sports that are like, nah, we don't want you. It's not a jock community. It's super kind. Like Jujitsu people in particular, they're some of the nicest people. It's my friends forever. They'll be my friends for life. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a good crew. I mean, when I got hurt, I really kind of missed the guys I trained with. It's like Davis put together this group. It's basically all these young pro fighters who are kind of up and coming.
kind of early 20s, but they've only been doing it for a few years. So I've been doing it for a few years that way. We kind of have a more similar level of skill, and they're all better than me. But in terms of, I'm like, I was in my late 30s, and they're in the early 20s, it was sort of like they're kind of becoming into becoming men. I'm like sort of at the end of my fiscal week. But it's like, it's,
It's a really good crew. Yeah, no, it's a good crew. And the competing thing is fun. I can't wait to get back to that too. I mean, it's like basically, I mean, I was also doing it with, so it's basically a group of profighters and then a handful of meta executives would do it. And basically, we would just kind of like fight each other and it would be fun. And then one of them decided one day that they were like, you know, I think I'm getting pretty good at jujitsu. I'm going to go to a tournament.
And I was like, all right, good luck with that, bro. I'm not going to go to tournament. I don't want to go to a tournament and get embarrassed. But then the guy goes to the tournament and he does pretty well.
that guy. It's like, it's like, okay, it's like, we go all the time and like, and if he's doing well in a tournament, that's like, I had fine sign me up, right? It's like, I mean, it's just like super competitive. So this was like, when was this? It must have been, I don't know, I guess I rolled into this tournament.
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. 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 this stuff off. And the guy was like, Oh, what?
That's kind of a cheat code. I mean, it kind of freaked out. I think he was trying to figure out what was going on. Afterwards, his coach was like, I think that was Mark Zuckerberg who just submitted me. And the coach was like, no, no, no way. And it's like, no, I think that was. It's like, you're fighting Mark Zuckerberg. He's like, get back in there. It's like, go find him. He's like, no, he just submitted me.
That's very funny. Yeah, man. Well, Tom Hardy's doing that too, right? He's done multiple tournaments now. Yeah. I think, 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? Oh, no, I'm done with the rehab now. I'm just ramping the guy. How far out are you from surgery?
12 So you did the patella tenon graft right I did yeah, that's a rough one to come back from I did the Patella tenon graft from my left knee and it took me about a year I did the ACL from a cadaver It's actually they use an Achilles tendon for my cadaver on my right knee and I was back to jujitsu in six months
Like full confidence in six months. That was interesting. 100% recovered, kicking the bag, everything. Nice. Yeah. How old were you when you got those? The first one I was 26. The second one I was 30.
1, 32, somewhere around there. So young. Yeah. So my doctor is basically like, look, you're at the, you're like at the boundary, you could go either way, but if you want to compete again, then I'd recommend doing the patella.
Yeah, I know they say that. I don't agree with that. I mean, just from my own personal experience, my doctor told me that the ACL from a cadaver when they use the patella tinnigraft is 150% stronger than your natural ACL. He said, you'll be back to because I didn't have any meniscus damage in my right name. He's like, you'll be back to 100%
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. But the patella 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, it was fucking painful.
It took forever to break all that scar tissue up. 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 don't know. I think that it's supposed to be a couple of years until you feel like it's full. I think it takes some time for the nerves to grow into it and all that. Did you incorporate peptides in your recovery?
I didn't. Do you hate healing? Do I hate healing? No, I didn't use peptides. I don't know. I just took my doctor's advice on it. Don't do that anymore. I mean, next time, there's other people to talk to. Yeah. I mean, it's gone pretty well. It's gone pretty well. It goes pretty well. It would go quicker with peptides. Yeah. 100% for sure. But it's been this interesting opportunity to like
Like I really don't want that to happen again. So I feel like I'm so much more focused on technique. Like the first time that I learned all the stuff, I was like, I was probably like a little too British about it and just like muscling through stuff and now, I don't know. Now I feel like I'm like really learning how to do the stuff correctly and I can do it way more effortlessly. So it's the goal. How did it pop? How did it pop?
I was like the end of a session and there were two hours into training and I was doing like a few rounds 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. So it was the planted leg, but... My arm was planted leg too. 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. Yeah, so you're too tired as well. Yeah, and I basically, and I hadn't, you know, I basically had also just done a really hard kind of like leg workout the day before, but I don't think the, but the fight guys didn't know that. So I, I really just pushed it too hard. Are you aware of a knees over toes guy? Yeah. Have you done his stuff?
I've looked at it a bunch. I mean, the rehab thing I took really seriously, I thought that was pretty interesting too. I don't want to like have to do a lot of rehabs like this one, but to do one of them, I actually thought it was a pretty interesting experience because it's like week over week, you're just getting back so much mobility and ability to do stuff. And no, I feel like I'm.
I don't know, at this point, I just like probably half my weight training is effectively kind of like rehab and joint health stuff, like wrists, shoulders, knee, all that in addition to the big muscle groups. Yeah, that's very smart. 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. Everything from Nordic curls, do you do those? Do you do Nordic curls?
I should. I should do more than I do. Yeah. Leg curls, Nordic curls, but Nordic curls in particular because, you know, it's very difficult to do. You lift your whole body up with your hamstrings. Yeah. And all these different slant board squats and different lunges and split squats and all these different things which like really strengthen up all the supporting muscles around the knee, better than anything that I've ever tried before.
And he's got like a whole program where it scales up and he puts it online for everybody. And he gives away a lot of information for free because he said, 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. Great guy. Yeah. Cool. But I can't recommend that stuff enough. But I think what you're doing is like strengthening shoulders, strengthening. That's really the way to do it. Like you have to think of muscles in terms of like armor.
If you want to do this thing, it's better to have good bumpers around your car if you might bump into other cars. You don't want to just have raw sheet metal. And I think a lot of people just focus on the big movements and weight training. First of all, for a lot of fighting type stuff, you kind of want to be loose and not super tight.
But yeah, I mean, I just think like the joint stability stuff is you get older and I want to do this for a longer period of time. It's good to do. Yeah, it's huge. It's mobility in general. It's just like so important. You can compete in Jiu Jitsu for a long time. There's like all these masters, divisions, and stuff, and yeah, crazy looking 70 year old dudes trying to kill each other. Yeah, nuts. It's great.
It is great, but for real, sincerely, we're very happy. 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. 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.
No, I think it's super intellectual in terms of actually breaking this stuff down. I mean, both jujitsu and like striking. I mean, yeah, you don't have time to think, but like the reasoning behind why you kind of want to slip in certain ways and like the probability game that you're playing is
I don't know. I used to fence when I was in high school, and I did that pretty competitively. I was never quite good enough to be at the Olympic level, but I was pretty good. We virtual fenced last time you were here. There you go.
I just remember I would sit in my classes in high school and sketch out combinations of moves and sequences for how to faint and trick someone to get them out of position to be able to tap them.
I feel like this is a game in the same way. When you're training, you're not slugging at each other that much. You're just playing tag. Yeah, you're playing tag. Well, the way the ties do it, I think, is the best. 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.
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, when you're not trying to hurt each other, you know, then you really do learn the technique. Like, and it gets fully ingrained in your system. Yeah.
It's great. Yeah. You just have to be careful brain damage. Like you were talking about having an MMA fighter. You're still entertaining that. I want to. I mean, this is my thing. It's like, and I think I probably will, but we'll, we'll see. I mean, it's 2025. I think it's going to be a very busy year on the AI side. Yeah. 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 so I need to I need to figure this out because I don't I don't know how with everything that's going on in AI I'm gonna
have like a week or two where I can just get into this like I'm going to go fight someone, but it's good. It's good training. But I would like to at some point. You know, the thing about the ACL injury is I kind of thought before this, like, all right, I'm going to do some Jiu Jitsu competitions. 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
I think tearing the ACL striking is a little more of a fluke, but I think you're much more likely to do that grappling. 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? So like, all right, I can take a few more punches to the face before we go back to that.
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. Okay. And that's what you call opportunity. Yeah. I mean, this like Tom Aspenol famously blew his out against Curtis Blades with a supporting leg just through a kick and his freak accidents. Yeah. Weird things happen. Um, you're, 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.
Yeah, but Jiu Jitsu isn't always slower controlled. No, especially when you're competing. No, especially when you're competing. Unless you're really, really good. Like, have you ever watched Gordon? Like, Gordon never moves fast. He doesn't have to. He doesn't have to move fast. He's just like always a step ahead of everybody. Have you talked to him at all? Oh, yeah. Did you talk to John Donner here?
Um, no, I haven't. Yeah, I would be interested. That's the greatest mind in combat sports. Now Gordon, I don't, I don't say that lightly. John Donner is the greatest mind in combat sports. Interesting. By far.
He's a legitimate genius. You know the whole story, right? I think I was a professor of philosophy at Stanford. And just Columbia? Where was he? I forgot. I think Columbia. Columbia. Columbia. And then decides, oh, I'm just going to teach Jujitsu all day, sleeps on the mats, teaches all day long. Where's a rash guard anywhere he goes? He's a freak. And he's so fucking smart, like scary smart about all kinds of things. It's not just Jujitsu. He's got a memory, like a steel vise. Like he just holds on to thoughts and can
repeat them, his recalls, and saying, he's just a legitimate genius that became obsessed with Jujitsu. And what he's done with Gordon and with Gary Tonin and just a series of other athletes is nothing short of extraordinary.
You know, just an interesting guy to have conversations with too. Have you seen him on Lex's show? He's done a couple episodes with Lex and I watched, I saw the one that you did with him. Yeah, love the guy. 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,
Why? I might have to rethink this. Yeah, there's a there's a whole spectrum of people. Yeah. Yeah. What is it done in terms of a lot of one of the things that a lot of people said and I have to like nothing turns you into a libertarian quicker than Jiu Jitsu.
Why that is I think it's a hard work thing is 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. 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 and they're only there to try to make up for hard work. Yeah.
um... yeah i don't know i mean it's kind of just what i was saying before i think the for me it's uh...
just I think a lot of the corporate world is, is like pretty culturally neutered. And, and 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, my whole life. And it's like, so I think, um,
I don't know. There's just something, the kind of masculine energy I think is good. And obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really like trying to get away from it. And I do think that there's just something, it's like, I don't know, 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.
That has been a kind of a positive experience for me. Just like having a thing that I can just like do with my guy friends and life. And it's just like, we'll just like beat each other a bit. It's good. It is good. I agree. It's good. I could see your point though about corporate culture.
how when do you think that happened was that a slow shift because i think it used to be very masculine and used to be the thing it was kind of hyper aggressive at one point no i look and i think part of the the intent on all these things i think is good right it's like i do think that
If you're a woman going into a company, it probably feels like it's too masculine. There isn't enough of the energy that you may naturally have, and it probably feels like there are all these things that are set up that are biased against you. That's not good either, because 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.
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. 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 spectrum where it's all like, OK, masculinity is toxic. We have to get rid of it completely. It's like, no, both of these things are good. It's like, you want feminine energy. You want masculine energy. I think that you're going to have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that's all good.
But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing. And I didn't really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a much more masculine culture.
And not that it doesn't try to be inclusive in its own way. But 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 like. Well, that's how you become successful at martial arts. You have to be at least somewhat aggressive. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, there are these things. There are a few of these things throughout your life where you have an experience and you're like, where has this been my whole life? And it just turned on like a part of my brain that I was like,
Okay. This was a piece of the puzzle that should have been there, and I'm glad it now is. I felt that way when I started hunting. Oh, yeah, hunting too. Same thing. So you've done a lot of that as well. Yeah, well, so we have this ranch out in Kauai, and there's invasive pigs. On our ranch, we have
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 that's, I think, endangered, or at least was until recently. And most of them in the world live in a small stretch, or at least most of them on Kauai live in a small stretch that includes our ranch. So you constantly have these pigs that just multiply so quickly. 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 when I basically explain to my daughters who I also want to learn how to do this, because I just feel like it's like, look, we
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. It's part of what we do as the stewards of this. And we've got to do it. And then if you have to kill something, then you should obviously treat it with respect and use the meat to make food and kind of celebrate in that way. But it's a culture that I think it's
It's just an important thing for kids to grow up understanding the circle of life. Teaching the kids all of what is how you'd run a ranch, how you'd run a farm. I think that that's stuff.
It's good, because explaining to the kids what a tech company is is really abstract. For a while, my daughters were pretty convinced that my actual job was Mark's Meats, which is our ranch and the cattle that we ranch.
I was like, well, not quite. And you'll learn when you get older. But I think that there's something that's just much more tangible about that than taking them to the office and sitting in product reviews or something for some piece of software that we're writing.
Well, it's certainly a lot more primal. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 you had to go hunt it so you had to go Actually pull the trigger kill the animal yourself cut it up butcher it cook it You knew what you were doing. Yeah, well my favorite is bow bow and arrow. Mm-hmm. I mean that's I think like the most That that feels like the most kind of sporting version of it. 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 I prefer it because it requires more of you. Yeah. And you just kind of go and hang out. Yeah. And you have to be fit. Yeah. Especially if you're mountain hunting, you have to be really fit. Yeah. You can't just be kind of in shape. You got to be really fit. 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 and then actually carry the thing out. Yeah, and carry the thing out. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mostly use a rifle just because it's so much more efficient. Your conversion rate is so much higher, but it's... But yeah, another... What kind of boat do you have? Gosh, I didn't get to do it this season, but do you know the company that makes it?
Not at the top of my head. I have to know. This is embarrassing. I can get you hooked up. It works. You know how old it is? No, it's not old. I think it's just a compound bow that I got strung to my draw length. Did you get someone to coach you? Yeah. Who coached you?
It's basically a bunch of the guys who help run security around the ranch. The thing about archery is, just like martial arts, 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 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.
And learning how to have a surprise shot is... What do you mean? Yeah, surprise shot. You don't know. See, that's the thing. In high pressure situations, one of the most important things is to have 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. So you put the pin on the target, I use a thumb trigger. I use a thing called an OnX clicker. And the reason why I use the OnX clicker is like a hinge. It gives you a two stage of the trigger, right? So as I'm at full draw, I put slight pressure on the here click.
And that click means it's ready to go off with more pressure. So I've gone through stage one. 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, there's no, there's no thing that people do when they have a finger trigger. 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 you're moving while you're you're shooting when you're doing it with a rifle It's very different because obviously rifles far faster. Yeah, and then you have a scope So you know you're zoomed in many magnifications and all you have to do is just slowly squeeze 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
with a bow, it's very different, because you're holding it with your arms, so you have to have the proper form, you have to have the proper posture, and then there's this thought process. And my friend Joel Turner, who is a sniper, created a whole system for people called ShotIQ, he's got this whole online system of developing the proper execution of a shot. When you see 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. 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 closest center. They're hitting the 10 ring every arrow.
for thirty hours in a row and then there's round after round another thirty hours of new people another thirty 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 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 these long stabilizers on their bow where they keep it totally steady. And it's all just about relaxing. And most of them use a hinge release. So you know what a hinge is? Have you ever used one? Okay, instead of a button, when you press it, you're rotating the hinge, which activates a sear. I just have a trigger. Yeah. So you're just hammering the trigger. You're doing exactly what you're not supposed to do. You're a trigger puncher. Yeah, you're a trigger puncher. You're a thumb? Yeah, you're hitting it with your thumb, right?
Yeah, I guarantee you, when you do it, your arm doesn't move. You go like this, like that. So with a good surprise shot, you shouldn't know it's going to go off. You're pulling, and then once the trigger breaks off, your arm will naturally go backwards. Because you're not anticipating the shot.
I'm definitely not doing that. Yeah. See, that's the thing. But how far away are you shooting things from? It depends. 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. There's a mounted head and then a photograph of me and my friend Cam. That one was 67 yards. I shot one at 79 yards once, but that's rare.
Most of the time, for me, my effective range, where I'd like to be is 60 yards and in. Yeah, because I was going to say, I don't think I've ever shot something more than 50 yards out. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, so I think that really, your form has to be tight. You have to be really confident. You have to have a lot of arrows down range. And then you have to be able to stay calm during the shot. So now imagine if you're shooting something at 18 yards, OK?
And you hammer the trigger. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, you're still going to get there. Because it's only 18 yards. 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. Meanwhile, you thought you were shooting accurately because you were inside a pie plate at 20 yards. 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 just one moment. Here it comes, here it comes now. And if you only do that once a year, like say if you go on one big elk onto a year,
You save up all your money, you get your gear already, you get your arrows weighed, you practice, and then you're in the mountains for 10 days, and then on the 11th day you get this animal that moves, it's at 57 yards, it stands there, and you're like, oh, oh, oh, 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. 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. Interesting.
Because Target Panic is a giant thing in the archery community. It's giant. Even saying it is like saying Voldemort. It's like, don't say it. People don't want to say it. It's like saying Candyman. People don't like it because it freaks people out. 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 when it gets where the target is. They hammer the trigger because they're just freaking out.
Yeah. Have you ever experienced that? I mean, I've missed if that's what you're asking. I haven't analyzed at this level of detail, but no, I mean, there are a lot of borders on our ranch. So I don't get. Yeah. And also like we have a range and we, um, 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,
I'm usually faster at taking down all the bowling pins with bow and arrow than most of my friends are with the pistol, which I think is pretty fun. But yeah, no, I was just more casual. 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. I'll take you on an elk hunt in the mountains. You'll get addicted.
I do think the dynamic that you're talking about, though, where if you only see one animal on a multi-day, then that is just way higher stakes than anything that I'm doing. 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 moment. Sure, sure. I'm talking about the archery that I'm doing. I mean, I go out. You're going to see some pigs. And if I don't hit any, it's like my family's still eating, it's OK.
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. You can be affected. I've clearly not learned this in a very rigorous way. I can get people to come to you. I posted a video on Instagram once of me, I think hitting bowling pins with archery, and all the comments are like, man, your form is shit. So I think it checks out with the conversation that we're having now. The issue with that is that you're reading the comments.
Like, you should never read comments. That's fair, that's fair. I've never had anything good come out of reading comments. Yeah, although, I don't know, it's pretty funny. I think that just like getting the gist and the summary of it, I think is pretty funny. Yeah, it's funny. It's just not mentally healthy. Yeah, no, you can't spend too much time on it. I don't spend any time on it. Yeah, I'm a much happier person since like, it's like avoided comments. Yeah, it's just too weird.
You're just delving into the world of all these people's mental illness and screaming at people and just, oh, I don't want 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. I do that and I shouldn't do that. But I definitely don't send them to them. Hey, bro, did you see this?
Those guys are the worst guys. It'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. I don't want it out. Yeah. Yeah. Social media is it's 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 and a bizarre sort of just disconnect from physical reality by most of your communication being electronic.
Yeah, and I think, you know, we basically, my kids at this point are nine, seven, and one and a half. So you're not interested in that or you're not. Of course you're interested. I mean, I'm very focused. I think that it's about to start getting a lot more complicated. I think, you know, the nine and seven year old, 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, um, it's, uh,
It's really complicated. And look, I mean, I think every family has their own values and how they want to approach this, right? So from my perspective, you know, our, we have one of my daughters just like loves building stuff. So she clearly like takes after me in this way. It's like every day she's just like creating some random thing. It's like she's creating stuff with Legos and, you know, it's like,
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. 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. Right. In that case, probably not. Now, there were times when, um,
She'd get so excited about what she was building in Minecraft or something that she was coding and scratch that she'd wake up early to kind of get her tablet. And that was bad, because then it's like starting to get in the way of her sleep. And I'm like, August, you can't do that. It's like we're going to take your iPad away if you're doing that. Your little psycho getting up early. No, it's like August.
I did that too when I was a kid, but trust me, you're going to want to sleep. It's not going to lead to success, meanwhile you're on a fucking island. What are the richest people in the world? What the fuck, dad? Didn't it work for you? Leave me alone, my iPad. Trying to figure out how to build a mansion.
It's either gonna work or it's gonna end badly, but it's like, but I feel like building stuff I feel generally pretty good about. 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, you know, it's like that type of stuff is good. You know, 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. That's much better than just having like an open texting service.
But I don't know, but there's a lot of stuff that's like pretty sketchy. And I kind of think like different parents are going to have different lines on what they want their kids to be able to do and not. Yeah. You know, 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. I don't think about that as building. I think that is a game. I don't limit the time that you're doing that. I want you to go read books instead or whatever, whatever the values are that that family has. So for meta,
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. Now, we don't even really, 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. 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. But when they turn 13,
We basically want parents to be able to have complete control over the kid's experience. We just rolled out this Instagram Teens thing, which is it's a set of controls where if you're an older teen, we'll just default you into the private experience that way you're not getting harassed or bombarded with stuff.
But if you're a younger teen, then you have to get your parents' permission. And they actually have to sign in and do all the stuff in order to make it so that you can connect with people who are beyond your network, or if you want to be a public figure, all these different kinds of things. So I think that that's probably, from a values perspective, where we should be, is just trying to be an ally of parents. But it is complicated stuff. Every family wants to do it differently.
It is complicated and there's also this dismissal of activities that are done electronically as not being beneficial. 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.
Interesting. Yeah. Well, the people who do the training in VR definitely make last mistakes. Oh, yeah. Well, that is, to me, one of the most fascinating aspects of technology today. You know, when you and I were doing that game or fencing with each other, I'm like, this could be applied to so many different things now. It's like,
There's so many opportunities, not just for just pure recreation, but education. There's so many things you could learn skills through AR or VR that it'll greatly enhance your ability to do those things in the real world. I mean, it's a real, 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've ever done sandbox, you ever do sandbox?
Um, do you know the sandbox VR? Do you know what that company is? Yeah, you go to a warehouse and put on a haptic feedback. Yeah. Yeah. You shoot zombies. I'm so addicted. I'm so addicted. 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 are zombies coming at you. Yeah, no, my, my zombie game is Arizona sunshine. Oh, it's, it's, it's, you just like it's can be multiplayer and there's horde mode where you just get in there and
They're like four friends and there's just like waves of zombies come and you can kill them all. Is that Oculus? Yeah. Oh, yeah, I have to try it. Yeah, I haven't tried that one yet. That's my, it's very therapeutic. You just wait until they come into point blank range. How long before you guys develop some sort of a haptic feedback suit where like it covers the whole body? Oh man. Is that possible? It's possible. I think that there's
other things that are probably more important to deliver. So I guess take a step back. A lot of how we think about the goal here is delivering a realistic sense of presence. No technology today gives you the feeling as if you're physically there with another person. You're interacting with them through a phone, you have this little window, it's taking you away from everything. That's 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? 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, getting good spatial audio right if someone speaks, then it should do the audio needs to be 3D and come from the place where they're speaking.
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. So having hands, obviously, if you're just looking around, but you can't actually move things, that breaks the illusion. But having hands and a 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. Obviously, seeing your arms as a bonus, unless we incorrectly interpolate where your elbows are or something. So if we have, 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 arm could be like this, it could be like this. So you can kind of guess from that. But if we get that wrong,
And you see in VR, you see the hand there and your elbow looks like it's here when it's actually out there. You're like, ah, what's going on? That's messed up. 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. We have so many more.
the neurons basically, not neurons, but just the sensation. It's such higher resolution on your fingertips than anywhere else in the body. So when you grab something, making it so that you feel some pushback, there's a lot of gaming systems at this point where if you pull a trigger, you get a little bit of a rumble or something.
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
like the virtual ball hitting the ping pong paddle and it feels like, like when you're actually paying ping pong, it doesn't, it's not like a generic thing where just like you feel it hit the paddle, you feel where it hits the paddle. Then we basically built a system where now with this like physical paddle, you can kind of it, the haptics make it so you can feel where the ball hits the paddle. So it's like all these things like are just going towards delivering a more realistic experience. So, um,
full-body haptics so there are some things that i think it could do like if you get if you're playing a boxing game you get punched in the stomach um... you can probably simulate something like that a little um... it's not going to deliver that much force so i mean i guess that's maybe a good thing is no one wants to get rich in the stomach that hard but but like
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, I don't know, you need something on the other side to be able to complete it, right? Because it's like when you kick, when you're, when you're just practicing, it's like you spin, right? Because you don't want to just like stop. And it's, um, that's like the shadowing a kick.
There's not going to be anything that you can do as a single person playing VR with a haptic suit that 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. So grappling, I think that jujitsu is going to be the last thing that we're able to do. In VR, because you need the momentum of the other person and to be able to move them.
The boxing thing is actually good. Boxing works. Yeah. Boxing works even. And you don't really need the haptics. 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. So you can like just feel it on your body. But.
I don't know. I think what's basically going to end up happening is you're going to have like a home setup for these things. And then you're going to have, there are these like location based services where like people, it's almost like a theme park where you can go into and you can have like a really immersive VR experience where it's not just that you get like a vest that can simulate some haptics. It's that you're also like in a real physical environment. So they can like,
have smoke come out or something and you can smell that and feel that or like spray some water and it feels humid. And I think that it still is going to be a while before you can just like virtually create all those sensations. I think a lot of those really rich experiences are going to be in these very constructed environments.
Is the bridge when they figure out some sort of a neural interface? So instead of having these extraneous things, instead of having a fan blowing at you or the ground moves a little bit, have everything happen inside your head.
Well, in terms of neural interfaces, there are two approaches to the problem, roughly. There's the jacket into your brain neural interface, and there's the wrist-based neural interface thing that we showed you for Orion, the smart glasses. I would guess that
I think it's going to be a while before 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. You want to wait until that's pretty mature before you get that. That's basically going to get started in medical use cases. If someone loses sensation part of their body and now you have the ability to fix that.
Like the first neurolink patient. 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 into play games better, right? Right. But.
A wrist-based thing, I mean, that's something, people wear stuff on the wrist all the time. And what we basically found there, that doesn't do input to you, but it's good for giving you the ability to control a computer. Because basically, you have all these extra neurons that go from your brain to controlling your hand. Your hand is super complicated.