critical thinking of mark zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg explains his hiring philosophy

Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of critical thinking in an interview with Bloomberg.
Zuckerberg said his hiring strategy follows the same line of thought.
The CEO has also said he wouldn't hire someone to work for him if he wouldn't work for them.

If you're interested in entering the tech or AI space, you might be wondering what you should study .

But Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Bloomberg's Emily Chang published Tuesday that the most important thing is "learning how to think critically and learning values when you're young." Zuckerberg gave the example of his young daughter, who is 40 pages into writing a novel about "mermaid crystals" and is using meta AI to generate images.

Zuckerberg said in the interview that his "hiring philosophy" follows this line of thought.

"If people have shown that they can go deep and do one thing really well, then they've probably gained experience in, like, the art of learning something," Zuckerberg said in the interview.

The CEO said that kind of skill is generally applicable to other things that could come up during a career at Meta. The key thing is demonstrating you're capable of drilling into something and mastering it.

It's not the first time the CEO has talked about considering a candidate's values when hiring. Zuckerberg shared at a Mobile World Congress Q&A in 2015 that Facebook had struggled with hiring and sometimes brought people on who may not have been the best fit for the job, CNN reported. He said the company tried to look for people whose values aligned with the company.

Watch: Microsoft CEO unravels ChatGPT, ethical AI, and going bust

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How Mark Zuckerberg Thinks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Mark Zuckerberg Uses Optimal Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

Want to Put Optimal Thinking to the Test?

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

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

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

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

9 Responses to “How Mark Zuckerberg Thinks”

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

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

Brilliant analysis. Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design Blog. Tim is an author of 5 #1 NYT/WSJ bestsellers, investor (FB, Uber, Twitter, 50+ more), and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (400M+ downloads)

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Overcast , Podcast Addict , Pocket Casts , Stitcher , Castbox , Google Podcasts , Amazon Music , or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the video on YouTube here .

DUE TO SOME HEADACHES IN THE PAST, PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS: Tim Ferriss owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity. WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Tim Ferriss Show” and link back to the tim.blog/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above. WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use Tim Ferriss’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services. For the sake of clarity, media outlets are permitted to use photos of Tim Ferriss from the media room on tim.blog or (obviously) license photos of Tim Ferriss from Getty Images, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s a great book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: For sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: It’s simulated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: That’s generally true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Well, I appreciate that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: That’s a good point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Wait a second. Is this Jocko?

Mark Zuckerberg: It is.

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

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: There you go.

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, he’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Zuckerberg: Very emo.

Tim Ferriss: It’s very emo.

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: That’s amazing.

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

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

Tim Ferriss: A challenging one.

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

Tim Ferriss: Wow.

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

Tim Ferriss: Foiling’s really hard—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: I feel like we could.

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

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

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

Tim Ferriss: Yeah, for sure.

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

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

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

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page .

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

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

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

Leadership Qualities of Mark Zuckerberg

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

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

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

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

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

Leadership Characteristics and Traits of Mark Zuckerberg

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

Hard worker

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

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

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

Other traits and characteristics of Mark Zuckerberg are:

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

Leadership Skills of Mark Zuckerberg

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

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

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

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

Bottom Line

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

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

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Mark Zuckerberg Leadership Style & Principles

Mak Zuckerberg - Leadership Style and Principles cover

2020-11-25 18:33:41
19 minute(s)

Mark Zuckerberg Leadership Style & Principles

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

Mark Zuckerberg illustrates the transformational leadership style in action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think Different

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zuck's said

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough. — Mark Zuckerberg Share on X

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

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

Keep in mind that everything is possible in this world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

📚 Additional reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m here to build something for the long-term. Anything else is a distraction. — Mark Zuckerberg Share on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sheryl Sandberg – Leadership Style & Principles

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

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

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

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

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

Instead of building walls, we can help build bridges. — Mark Zuckerberg Share on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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F rom someone who had few friends (as portrayed in The Social Network), to hobnobbing with the likes of Peter Thiel and Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg has, from the start, built connections and relationships with the bigwigs of Silicon Valley.

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

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

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

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

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed. — Mark Zuckerberg Share on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t let people deter you. That’s how you do it. — Mark Zuckerberg Share on X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calm leaders bring stability.

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

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

Mindful Leadership 101
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G ood leaders recognize that they are not infallible. They make mistakes; they learn from them. They listen to criticism; they grow from it. Even early in his career, Zuckerberg proved true to both of these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Fix a Broken Mindset

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a dream and work on it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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7 Life Skills We Can Learn From Mark Zuckerberg

Life skills are surprisingly crucial to your success at work, too. Here’s why Mark Zuckerberg has mastered both.

What are life skills, anyway? I like the definition from UNICEF : “Life skills are defined as psychosocial abilities for adaptive and positive behavior that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.” These life skills include cognitive skills for analyzing and using information, personal skills for managing oneself as well as interpersonal skills for communicating and interacting effectively with others — all critical to your success as a leader and entrepreneur.

While our parents are typically the ones to teach us life skills, there are others out there who can provide lessons about life skills. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is one of these people whose public experience taught me about what it really means to achieve success. Here are seven life skills that I learned from him, and how you can apply them to your own career:

Equanimity. This is a fancy way of saying that Zuckerberg doesn’t lose his cool when he’s under pressure or in a stressful situation. Instead, he calmly approaches even the most difficult situations because anger doesn’t breed success — it only serves to alienate or give the impression that someone feels they don’t have control over a situation. Developing this equanimity has helped improve my relationships with employees and colleagues while providing a way to think more clearly about the critical problem or pressures in front of me.
Critical thinking. Zuckerberg has noted his interest in always going deeper with an issue or idea in order to really make a difference, be disruptive and maximize the value. As he once said , “I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.” I could see that success only comes from taking the time to think more critically rather than just accepting the first idea that comes to mind.
Problem-solving. Zuckerberg has always focused on solving problems. As he noted in a biography about him , “The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time.” I knew that, at the heart of every business I considered creating, there had to be a relevant problem that needed solving to help a consumer or a business.
Effective communication. While many leaders leave employee communication to others on the team, Zuckerberg has always taken on this role himself. In creating a company that increases communication and interaction between people, it makes sense that he would also take this approach with his employees. Many of those who have worked at Facebook note how he is always walking around, talking to everyone, asking questions and getting to know them personally. When I tried this for myself, I realized how much more willing my team members were to share what was going on, how they felt, and voice any ideas they had for making changes. Keeping open communication with your team not only builds trust but can also help you be a more effective leader.
Assertiveness. Zuckerberg is not interested in following or doing things on other people’s terms. As he noted in a Wired Magazine interview , “Sometimes we are going to do stuff that’s controversial, and we’re going to make mistakes. We have to be willing to take risks.” It’s this attitude that proves how a product, service, company and brand can make strides in completely changing an industry. Success doesn’t come from worrying about how something will work; instead, you just have to jump in and do it.
Mindfulness: Zuckerberg doesn’t let his critics get to him. I learned that the ability to ignore the noise around me has helped me to use the energy I would have wasted on worrying about what others thought of me. I use it to fuel creativity, innovation and actions that have furthered my business success. Taking a mindful approach to what you want to accomplish — and blocking out the rest — is critical.
Vision. In recent years, Zuckerberg has become more involved in shaping the global business landscape, illustrating that he is more than just a “one-hit wonder.” His recent address at the United Nations noted the need to expand Internet access to developing nations, illustrating his interest in the future of human rights and social issues. Zuckerberg has also met with country leaders as part of his vision for shaping future generations and helping tackle various global social problems. I value his leadership style and encourage those working in technology to follow suit in taking on a bigger role in real-world issues, rather than relying on politicians to do it for us.

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

Cynthia Johnson

Co-Founder + CEO Bell + Ivy

Cynthia Johnson is Co-Founder at Bell + Ivy, an author, speaker, and marketing professional.

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Episode 328

Extra: mark zuckerberg full interview.

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

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Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mark Zuckerberg Shares Insights on Hiring and Critical Thinking

News Synopsis

Aspiring tech and AI professionals might be laser-focused on specific courses and degrees. But according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg , the most crucial skill for success goes deeper.

Learning How to Learn: A Lifelong Skill

In a recent interview with Bloomberg's Emily Chang, Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of "learning how to think critically and learning values when you're young." He used his own daughter as an example. Despite being just four years old, she's already demonstrating a passion for learning by writing a novel and utilizing Meta AI tools to create images.

This approach reflects Zuckerberg's hiring philosophy . He believes that individuals who can "go deep and do one thing really well" have honed the essential skill of "learning how to learn." This adaptability is crucial for navigating the ever-evolving tech landscape.

This isn't the first time Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has highlighted the importance of values in hiring. He previously acknowledged that Facebook (now Meta) had previously struggled to find the right cultural fit for some positions.

Hiring for Cultural Fit and Leadership Potential

Zuckerberg has consistently emphasized several key aspects in his hiring philosophy:

Cultural Fit: He encourages finding candidates whose values align with Meta's mission and company culture.

Mutual Respect: He believes in only hiring someone he would be comfortable working under, ensuring a strong leadership team built on respect.

Confidence in Strength: Zuckerberg credits former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg with teaching him the importance of surrounding himself with talented individuals, even if they possess stronger skillsets in certain areas. This fosters a culture of collaboration and innovation.

Meta's Hiring Landscape: Shifting Priorities

While Zuckerberg's hiring standards remain high, Meta's approach has recently shifted. After experiencing rapid growth during the pandemic, the company is currently focusing on efficiency and streamlining its workforce. This has resulted in hiring slowdowns, headcount limitations, and even company-wide layoffs in 2022 and 2023. Reports suggest future reductions in upper Meta

Mark Zuckerberg's hiring philosophy is a testament to the evolving nature of talent acquisition in the tech industry. By prioritizing learning, critical thinking, and cultural alignment, Zuckerberg has built a framework that emphasizes potential over specific skill sets. This approach is particularly relevant in a rapidly changing field like technology, where adaptability and a growth mindset are paramount.

However, the challenges faced by Meta, including the need for efficiency and cost reduction, have led to significant changes in hiring practices. As the company navigates these complexities, Zuckerberg's core philosophy will be tested. It remains to be seen how Meta will balance its long-term vision of fostering innovation with the short-term demands of a competitive market.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg's emphasis on learning and values offers valuable insights for both job seekers and employers alike. By cultivating a culture that prioritizes growth and shared purpose, organizations can increase their chances of attracting and retaining top talent.

You can watch the full Bloomberg interview with Mark Zuckerberg here: Watch the interview

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Facebook is stopping Hiring

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HCL Technologies Has Reportedly Laid Off 350 Employees Globally

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Bad habits that people in the industry need to quit

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

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

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

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they were not.

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

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

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

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

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

Do you consider Apple an amplifier?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, we’re going to get into that.

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

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

They are using all technology for these, whether —

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

It’s just a few weeks now.

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

That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we know these things are flimsy arguments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve always felt really responsible for —

Mark Zuckerberg — what would you do?

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

OK. [LAUGHTER]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do you stand now on that?

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

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

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

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

Yeah, it’s coming in a month.

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

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

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

It depends on what they’re doing. Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not a Hollywood guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being called “Tim Apple“?

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

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

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

Talk about voting rights and what you said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there a cost to a CEO inserting themselves in?

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

Right, or not — or be very happy.

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

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

I am. They build homes.

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

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

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

Yeah. Are you worried?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe just go on vacation.

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

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

All right, bye.

Bye-bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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

Produced by ‘Sway’

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

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

The Unexpected Management Genius of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being a visionary is harder than it looks.

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

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

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

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

A consistent message helps rally the troops.

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

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

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

QNA.12.01.16.Zuckerberg Key Lieutentants box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researching of Mark Zuckerberg’s Creativity Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Zuckerberg’s Early-Age Computer Program Works

Zuckerberg’s creativity and success story, creative traits zuckerberg revealed in facing obstacles, zuckerberg turns his failures turn into strengths.

Mark Zuckerberg is commonly identified as a creative individual who has made a difference in his field. Zuckerberg is the CEO, founder, and chair of Facebook, FB. He was born in 1984 into a well-educated family as his father ran a dental clinic while his mother was a psychiatrist (Mary para 2). The essay presents the life events of Mark Zuckerberg that demonstrate his creativity and success in his career.

Zuckerberg’s interests in computers developed during his childhood, as at 12 years of age, he established Zucknet, a computer program that was meant for local messaging. Zuckerberg created Zucknet purposely to provide real-time communication and help his father, Andrew in his clinical tasks (Biography.com Editors para 2). With Zucknet, information could be passed easily to Andrew and his staff without necessarily shouting at each other. Besides, Zuckerberg’s family used the program at home to interact within their house. With assistance from his friends, Zuckerberg also developed virtual games that they used to have fun with (Biography.com Editors para 6). These signs of successful creativity at his tender age made his family get him a computer-programming instructor during his education in high school.

Zuckerberg attended prep school in New Hampshire, where he demonstrated exceptional skills in fencing. Due to their exemplary performance in this sport, the school appointed him the team’s captain. Moreover, he outshined in literature and earned a diploma in classics. Although several organizations including, Microsoft and AOL, expressed interest in buying Zuckerberg’s programs and hiring him before graduation, he declined the offers (Mary para 5). Zuckerberg graduated in 2003 from high school after which, he enrolled at Harvard University.

At Harvard University, it took Zuckerberg a short period before being identified as a computer programmer expert. He developed two programs, namely, CourseMatch and FaceMash, by his sophomore year. The CourseMatch enabled university scholars to select their classes based on their course selections. FaceMash enabled the comparison of students’ pictures and assisted users in voting for their preferred candidates based on their attractiveness. The two programs became widely known at the university but were later shut down after they were thought to be unsuitable.

Later on, Zuckerberg and three of his friends, Divya, Cameron, and Tyler, collaborated to create a social networking site to advance the connection of the Harvard University community. In June 2004, the site went live under the name “The Facebook,” and Zuckerberg managed the site from his dorm room (Biography.com Editors para 2). After sophomore, Zuckerberg dropped out of the university to work on Facebook full-time and by the beginning of the year 2005, the website had one million users (Biography.com Editors para 9).

With the significant number of users on this platform, many organizations showed their interest to trade with Facebook. For instance, in 2005, Accel Partners made a venture capital investment with Facebook, the first venture the company had ever received. Facebook opened up to learners attending other schools making the website attain more than 5.5 million users. Since 2005 the site has received various acquisitions from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo (Biography.com Editors para 9). In October 2019, the company reported that the daily active users were 1.62 billion on average, which was a rise of 2 percent from the previous quarter of the year (Josh para 2).

Critical thinking is one of the creative traits that Zuckerberg demonstrated whenever he faced a challenge. For instance, when his two programs were considered unsuitable and were shut down, he thought of alternative programs that would improve social life on campus. Zuckerberg created Facebook, one of the most and widely used online social platforms in the world (Amy para 6). He achieved this with the assistance of his friends, with whom he had collaborated. Facebook is believed to have improved the social lives of many people globally. Besides, findings show that Zuckerberg had a great interest in going deeper into an issue to maximize the value or make a difference (Amy para 6). Zuckerberg believes that success comes from thinking critically and not by accepting the first idea that comes to mind when facing challenges.

Zuckerberg also expresses mindfulness and perseverance traits when facing life challenges. He does not allow critics to get to him as he always ignores them. The quality has helped him to devote his efforts to fueling innovation, creativity, and actions that have furthered his business success. For instance, when Zuckerberg was a college student, he faced lots of criticism for getting the blame for stealing the Harvardconnectins.com idea and generating a competing invention (Biography.com Editors para 20). Despite all these allegations, Zuckerberg was always mindful of his work, and this helped him get accurate recognition and respect later from the world.

Moreover, Zuckerberg was a team builder, a character that helped him face obstacles with confidence. Zuckerberg believes that a great team is all that one needs to be successful. After discovering Facebook, Zuckerberg knew that he could not build a great company all by himself. Being a coder and a developer, he knew he needed a businessperson whose vision aligned with his to be successful. Various challenges faced while building his business made him employ Sheryl Sandberg who helped in managing the business (David para 1). Sheryl was made the chief operating officer of Facebook, and their partnership and collaboration have proved to be great for the company.

Dropping out of college to manage Facebook was a failure that later turned into a strength. Mark Zuckerberg failed to understand that, apart from business success, his degree was significant as it would have equipped him with skills and knowledge to master complex trials and overcome adversity. Besides, completing his course in college would have fitted him with specific abilities that would help him in his computer programming activities. However, Zuckerberg turned this failure into success after discovering Facebook which has made him famous and rich. He has also proved his exceptional skills in computer programming even without a college certificate.

As well, Zuckerberg learned the importance of living a purposeful life. In his speech to the Harvard University class of 2017, he advised the scholars to live a life of sense (Asma para 5). He further added that instead of selecting a career or a job, one should focus on choosing a purpose (Asma para 5). Apparently, after dropping out of college, he diligently worked hard to build his programs, and this made him receive an honorary degree from the same college he dropped out of.

In summation, Zuckerberg is perceived as a creative person who has made a difference in his life. His creativity is seen in his successful projects, which include Zucknet, CourseMatch, FaceMash and Facebook. Although he faced many obstacles, Zuckerberg demonstrated various traits, including critical thinking, mindfulness, perseverance, and team-building, to overcome challenges and turn his failures into strengths. Throughout his life, Zuckerberg teaches people the need to lead a purposeful life.

Amy, Harvey. “Mark Zuckerberg Success Story: Net Worth, Education And Influence – The Entrepreneur Fund”. The Entrepreneur Fund , 2018. Web.

Asma, Khalid. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard Dropout, Delivers Commencement Speech”. 2017. Web.

Biography.com Editors. “Mark Zuckerberg”. Biography , 2019. Web.

David, Ingram. “Zuckerberg Says He Hopes Sheryl Sandberg Stays On” . NBC News , 2018. Web.

Josh, Constine. “Techcrunch Is Now A Part Of Verizon Media”. Techcrunch.Com , 2019. Web.

Mary, Bellis. “Biography of Mark Zuckerberg, Creator of Facebook”. Thoughtco , 2019. Web.

Traits of an Effective Leadership in Practice
Eberhardt Becoming a Player in French Imperial Politics
The Discipline of Innovation: The Trimming Technique
Musk's vs. Zuckerberg's Communication Contrasts
The Film "The Social Network"
Latin American Studies: Fernando Ortiz
Women who Changed the World: Marie Curie
Rafa al-Nasiri: Painter Biography
Simon Bolivar's Rule in the Article by Aline Helg
Did Hitler Commit Suicide?
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, October 20). Researching of Mark Zuckerberg’s Creativity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/researching-of-mark-zuckerbergs-creativity/

"Researching of Mark Zuckerberg’s Creativity." IvyPanda , 20 Oct. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/researching-of-mark-zuckerbergs-creativity/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Researching of Mark Zuckerberg’s Creativity'. 20 October.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Researching of Mark Zuckerberg’s Creativity." October 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/researching-of-mark-zuckerbergs-creativity/.

1. IvyPanda . "Researching of Mark Zuckerberg’s Creativity." October 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/researching-of-mark-zuckerbergs-creativity/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Researching of Mark Zuckerberg’s Creativity." October 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/researching-of-mark-zuckerbergs-creativity/.

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A Brief History of Mark Zuckerberg's Toughest Decisions (Infographic)

Here's a chronological list of the key moves that propelled the founder's success..

Looking back at the defining moments of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg 's career, a clear pattern emerges: he walked away from a lot of potentially great deals. In hindsight, it's easy to see that Zuckerberg made the right move every time, but back then these decisions were hardly cut-and-dried.

One of Facebook's early investors, Peter Thiel, has admitted that when Facebook turned down Yahoo's $1 billion acquisition offer, he was a "little worried." But his concerns were eased by the fact that Zuckerberg had a strong vision for the future of his company--which was to connect billions of users.

To see how Zuckerberg's strategic decisions led Facebook to where it is today, check out the infographic below. Credit goes to Funders and Founders ' information designer Anna Vital.

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., listens during a joint hearing of the Senate Judici...

Erica R. Hendry Erica R. Hendry

Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-we-learned-from-zuckerbergs-testimony-and-what-we-still-dont-know

What we learned from Zuckerberg’s testimony, and what we still don’t know

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened his testimony Tuesday on Capitol Hill with an apology — one that he’s repeated often since first acknowledging the firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly used personal information from as many as 87 million of the tech giant’s users: “I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

But that wasn’t good enough for many of the 44 senators who grilled Zuckerberg during a five-hour hearing on how Facebook handles user privacy. The lawmakers, from the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees, focused on the company’s knowledge of its users, where and how that information was shared, whether its practices were legal, and what Facebook was doing to prevent a massive data breach from happening again.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., suggested Facebook was a monopoly, one that may need to have more federal oversight. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked Zuckerberg whether he’d be comfortable sharing what hotel he stayed in last night. When Zuckerberg, after a long, nervous pause, said “no,” Durbin pointed out that that’s exactly the kind of user information his company shares with advertisers.

Others took aim at the company’s user agreement — the terms of service contract users must sign to open a Facebook account. The agreement lays out the company’s privacy policy, but several senators argued that it was too long and complex for most users to understand.

“Your user agreement sucks,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Zuckerberg in a pointed exchange. “It’s about covering Facebook’s rear end,” not protecting users’ rights. Kennedy added: “You know that and I know that. I’m going to suggest you go home and rewrite it.”

Here’s what we learned from Zuckerberg’s testimony — and what we still don’t know.

We still don’t know what Facebook knew about the Cambridge Analytica data breach and when exactly it happened , said Franklin Foer, a staff writer for “The Atlantic” and author of “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.” But we do know that Facebook didn’t tell users right away, and that it didn’t report it to the Federal Trade Commission, Foer told the PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz.

It’s clear that users consent to data sharing. But do they understand it? “I really doubt it,” says Nina Jankowicz,a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. Zuckerberg said several times Tuesday that users choose which data they share, but that’s a little deceptive, she explained. “What Zuckerberg is referring to is the physical act of consent, that is, clicking yes in order to access the platform or parts of it, or consenting to certain default privacy settings by not changing them. This isn’t really meaningful, as he himself admitted on multiple occasions today,” Jankowicz said. If users were actually presented with better details of what they were giving away they’d be far less likely to do it, she argued. Clear and frequent explanations of how data is used — and what other apps might be able to access it — is key to solving the problem, Jankowicz added, but that’s not happening at the moment.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook in some ways “is a publisher, that it has responsibilities for the content that it publishes,” Foer said — a far cry from the Zukerberg of six months ago, who said Facebook was not a media company and was not responsible for the content of its users.

Zuckerberg only paid lip service to “news literacy.” “This is more than just a buzzword,” said Jankowicz, who said she was surprised the CEO didn’t detail Facebook’s investment in separating sources that are reliable from those who are not, such as its recent fact-checking initiative. “This is a long term project that will take generations to bear fruit, and Facebook has a unique role to play in developing it as a skill with its ubiquitous access to everyone’s lives. How will it use it?”

The hearing focused much more on data protection and the Cambridge Analytica case than it did on bad actors’ interference in the elections. That’s troubling, Jankowicz said. “I was hoping Zuckerberg would shed some more light on Facebook’s about face regarding the role Russian disinformation played in shifting the discourse surrounding the 2016 election.”

Zuckerberg said that Facebook will be taking a more active role in monitoring and policing problematic content, with user-reported flags and, in the future, more AI technology that can catch inappropriate online behavior. But those tools may not be enough “for the most delicate and grey issues in our political discourse,” Jankowicz said. Zuckerberg stopped short of defining hate speech and struggled to answer questions from senators who asked him to draw lines between it and political activism. “I believe the best thing Facebook could do would be to spell out the types of content that are and are not permitted on the platform in plain English, and then vigorously enforce these standards,” Jankowicz said.

Congress is asking the right questions. But they must also produce the right answers, said Sam Lester, the consumer privacy counsel at the advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It is not up to Mark Zuckerberg to fix this problem — Congress must pass comprehensive privacy legislation,” Lester said. “The United States lags behind Europe in privacy protection, and we are at a critical moment now. We are optimistic that today’s hearing will lead to action.”

That could be difficult, however, because senators at the hearing often displayed a misunderstanding of the platform and how it works, as several reporters noted .

But even Mark Zuckerberg at times seemed not to understand how his platform works, Lester said. Still, “you don’t need a PhD in computer science to understand that Internet users need greater control over and protection of their data. And agencies exist precisely to provide expertise. For instance, Congress doesn’t need understand all the science behind pharmaceutical drugs – we have an FDA for that purpose.”

A key question going forward: Have Facebook’s actions complied with a 2011 consent order from the Federal Trade Commission on how it communicates with users? If not, why hasn’t the FTC taken action? In 2009 and 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and other organizations approached the FTC, claiming Facebook transfers users’ personal data to application developers without their knowledge or consent. That complaint led in 2011 to a 20-year consent decree that requires Facebook to “obtain consumers’ affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences.” Lester and EPIC argue that Facebook has violated that order by failing to prevent incidents like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook never got affirmative express consent for allowing apps to access users’ friends data, Lester argued. Senators focused on this issue during Tuesday’s hearing, signaling there may be more inquiries into what Facebook — and the FTC — should have done better.

Zuckerberg said he recognized that the company was likely going “to be regulated by government, and that regulation might ultimately be good for Facebook and Facebook’s users,” Foer said. Zuckerberg’s game, Foer added, is “trying to preserve Facebook’s dominant position, its monopoly. He would rather have this discussion be about the prospect of the regulation, rather than the prospect of having a discussion about antitrust and about breaking up the company.”

“I don’t see how they are ever going to escape this kind of arms race that they’re in, where they are going to have to keep pushing the boundaries of surveillance on their users.”

There’s a systematic failure of Facebook’s model that Zuckerberg didn’t fully address: The company is pledging to protect user data, but has built a business on profiting from it, Foer said. “They’re always going to be collecting as much data as possible in order to keep people’s attention for as long as possible, and then to also allow advertisers to target that attention as much as possible,” Foer said. “So I don’t see how they are ever going to escape this kind of arms race that they’re in, where they are going to have to keep pushing the boundaries of surveillance on their users.”

Where do we go from here? We shouldn’t expect any immediate action, Jankowicz. But there are a few things to watch: The Honest Ads Act, which has been backed by both Facebook and Twitter and would require more transparency for political ads online, and more tweaks to the platform, such as the additional privacy features Facebook has added over the past week.Congress will also be watching as the new European Union data law — which gives users more control of their data, particularly around consent — comes into effect next month, Jankowicz said. At some point, she added, “we will see some attempts at similar data privacy legislation in the U.S.”

The PBS NewsHour’s Joshua Barajas reported for this story.

Erica R. Hendry is the managing editor for digital at PBS NewsHour.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Manifesto On Building Global Community

The Full Version Of Mark Zuckerberg’s Manifesto On Building Global Community by Terry Heick Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to the facebook community (read: everyone), in which he lays out a kind of vision for our collective digital future, is bursting at the seams with ideas worth examining, whether because of their insightfulness or because of the…

The Full Version Of Mark Zuckerberg’s Manifesto On Building Global Community

by Terry Heick

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to the facebook community (read: everyone), in which he lays out a kind of vision for our collective digital future, is bursting at the seams with ideas worth examining, whether because of their insightfulness or because of the power of the person wielding them.

I’m going to write some kind of a response, but I can’t decide on the right angle to take that would make it more useful for educators (versus just my own soap-boxing). Until then, and in case you haven’t read it yet, below is the full version of his manifesto/letter/’vision’ as published to his facebook page .

See also: Why You Should Be Teaching Digital Citizenship

Read: The Full Version Of Mark Zuckerberg’s Manifesto On Humanity’s Future

“To our community,

On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?

History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers — from tribes to cities to nations. At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media and governments to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.

Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global — like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science. Our greatest challenges also need global responses — like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.

This is especially important right now. Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial. Every year, the world got more connected and this was seen as a positive trend. Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection. There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.

This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact. I am reminded of my favorite saying about technology: “We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years.” We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today. In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.

For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.

Bringing us all together as a global community is a project bigger than any one organization or company, but Facebook can help contribute to answering these five important questions:

How do we help people build supportive communities that strengthen traditional institutions in a world where membership in these institutions is declining?

How do we help people build a safe community that prevents harm, helps during crises and rebuilds afterwards in a world where anyone across the world can affect us?

How do we help people build an informed community that exposes us to new ideas and builds common understanding in a world where every person has a voice?

How do we help people build a civically-engaged community in a world where participation in voting sometimes includes less than half our population?

How do we help people build an inclusive community that reflects our collective values and common humanity from local to global levels, spanning cultures, nations and regions in a world with few examples of global communities?

My hope is that more of us will commit our energy to building the long term social infrastructure to bring humanity together. The answers to these questions won’t all come from Facebook, but I believe we can play a role.

Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation. Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning and improving. We take our responsibility seriously, and today I want to talk about how we plan to do our part to build this global community.

Supportive Communities

Building a global community that works for everyone starts with the millions of smaller communities and intimate social structures we turn to for our personal, emotional and spiritual needs.

Whether they’re churches, sports teams, unions or other local groups, they all share important roles as social infrastructure for our communities. They provide all of us with a sense of purpose and hope; moral validation that we are needed and part of something bigger than ourselves; comfort that we are not alone and a community is looking out for us; mentorship, guidance and personal development; a safety net; values, cultural norms and accountability; social gatherings, rituals and a way to meet new people; and a way to pass time.

In our society, we have personal relationships with friends and family, and then we have institutional relationships with the governments that set the rules. A healthy society also has many layers of communities between us and government that take care of our needs. When we refer to our “social fabric”, we usually mean the many mediating groups that bring us together and reinforce our values.

However, there has been a striking decline in the important social infrastructure of local communities over the past few decades. Since the 1970s, membership in some local groups has declined by as much as one-quarter, cutting across all segments of the population.

The decline raises deeper questions alongside surveys showing large percentages of our population lack a sense of hope for the future. It is possible many of our challenges are at least as much social as they are economic — related to a lack of community and connection to something greater than ourselves. As one pastor told me: “People feel unsettled. A lot of what was settling in the past doesn’t exist anymore.”

Online communities are a bright spot, and we can strengthen existing physical communities by helping people come together online as well as offline. In the same way connecting with friends online strengthens real relationships, developing this infrastructure will strengthen these communities, as well as enable completely new ones to form.

A woman named Christina was diagnosed with a rare disorder called Epidermolysis Bullosa — and now she’s a member of a group that connects 2,400 people around the world so none of them have to suffer alone. A man named Matt was raising his two sons by himself and he started the Black Fathers group to help men share advice and encouragement as they raise their families. In San Diego, more than 4,000 military family members are part of a group that helps them make friends with other spouses. These communities don’t just interact online. They hold get-togethers, organize dinners, and support each other in their daily lives.

We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call “very meaningful” groups. These are groups that upon joining, quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical support structure. For example, many new parents tell us that joining a parenting group after having a child fits this purpose.

There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives. More than one billion people are active members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their own — friends send invites or Facebook suggests them. If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric.

Going forward, we will measure Facebook’s progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall. This will require not only helping people connect with existing meaningful groups, but also enabling community leaders to create more meaningful groups for people to connect with.

The most successful physical communities have engaged leaders, and we’ve seen the same with online groups as well. In Berlin, a man named Monis Bukhari runs a group where he personally helps refugees find homes and jobs. Today, Facebook’s tools for group admins are relatively simple. We plan to build more tools to empower community leaders like Monis to run and grow their groups the way they’d like, similar to what we’ve done with Pages.

Most communities are made of many sub-communities, and this is another clear area for developing new tools. A school, for example, is not a single community, but many smaller groups among its classes, dorms and student groups. Just as the social fabric of society is made up of many communities, each community is made of many groups of personal connections. We plan to expand groups to support sub-communities.

We can look at many activities through the lens of building community. Watching video of our favorite sports team or TV show, reading our favorite newspaper, or playing our favorite game are not just entertainment or information but a shared experience and opportunity to bring together people who care about the same things. We can design these experiences not for passive consumption but for strengthening social connections.

Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new communities, transcending physical location. When we do this, beyond connecting online, we reinforce our physical communities by bringing us together in person to support each other.

A healthy society needs these communities to support our personal, emotional and spiritual needs. In a world where this physical social infrastructure has been declining, we have a real opportunity to help strengthen these communities and the social fabric of our society.

Safe Community

As we build a global community, this is a moment of truth. Our success isn’t just based on whether we can capture videos and share them with friends. It’s about whether we’re building a community that helps keep us safe — that prevents harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterwards.

Today’s threats are increasingly global, but the infrastructure to protect us is not. Problems like terrorism, natural disasters, disease, refugee crises, and climate change need coordinated responses from a worldwide vantage point. No nation can solve them alone. A virus in one nation can quickly spread to others. A conflict in one country can create a refugee crisis across continents. Pollution in one place can affect the environment around the world. Humanity’s current systems are insufficient to address these issues.

Many dedicated people join global non-profit organizations to help, but the market often fails to fund or incentivize building the necessary infrastructure. I have long expected more organizations and startups to build health and safety tools using technology, and I have been surprised by how little of what must be built has even been attempted. There is a real opportunity to build global safety infrastructure, and I have directed Facebook to invest more and more resources into serving this need.

For some of these problems, the Facebook community is in a unique position to help prevent harm, assist during a crisis, or come together to rebuild afterwards. This is because of the amount of communication across our network, our ability to quickly reach people worldwide in an emergency, and the vast scale of people’s intrinsic goodness aggregated across our community.

To prevent harm, we can build social infrastructure to help our community identify problems before they happen. When someone is thinking of committing suicide or hurting themselves, we’ve built infrastructure to give their friends and community tools that could save their life. When a child goes missing, we’ve built infrastructure to show Amber Alerts — and multiple children have been rescued without harm. And we’ve built infrastructure to work with public safety organizations around the world when we become aware of these issues. Going forward, there are even more cases where our community should be able to identify risks related to mental health, disease or crime.

To help during a crisis, we’ve built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let our friends know we’re safe and check on friends who might be affected by an attack or natural disaster. Safety Check has been activated almost 500 times in two years and has already notified people that their families and friends are safe more than a billion times. When there is a disaster, governments often call us to make sure Safety Check has been activated in their countries. But there is more to build. We recently added tools to find and offer shelter, food and other resources during emergencies. Over time, our community should be able to help during wars and ongoing issues that are not limited to a single event.

To rebuild after a crisis, we’ve built the world’s largest social infrastructure for collective action. A few years ago, after an earthquake in Nepal, the Facebook community raised $15 million to help people recover and rebuild — which was the largest crowdfunded relief effort in history. We saw a similar effort after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando when people across the country organized blood donations to help victims they had never met. Similarly, we built tools so millions of people could commit to becoming organ donors to save others after accidents, and registries reported larger boosts in sign ups than ever before.

Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community.

There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since it’s impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events — like suicides, some live streamed — that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more.

Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should review. This is still very early in development, but we have started to have it look at some content, and it already generates about one-third of all reports to the team that reviews content for our community.

It will take many years to fully develop these systems. Right now, we’re starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organization. This is technically difficult as it requires building AI that can read and understand news, but we need to work on this to help fight terrorism worldwide.

See also: Why You Should Be Teaching Digital Citizenship

As we discuss keeping our community safe, it is important to emphasize that part of keeping people safe is protecting individual security and liberty. We are strong advocates of encryption and have built it into the largest messaging platforms in the world — WhatsApp and Messenger. Keeping our community safe does not require compromising privacy. Since building end-to-end encryption into WhatsApp, we have reduced spam and malicious content by more than 75%.

The path forward is to recognize that a global community needs social infrastructure to keep us safe from threats around the world, and that our community is uniquely positioned to prevent disasters, help during crises, and rebuild afterwards. Keeping the global community safe is an important part of our mission — and an important part of how we’ll measure our progress going forward.

Informed Community

The purpose of any community is to bring people together to do things we couldn’t do on our own. To do this, we need ways to share new ideas and share enough common understanding to actually work together.

Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very positive force for public discourse because it increases the diversity of ideas shared. But the past year has also shown it may fragment our shared sense of reality. It is our responsibility to amplify the good effects and mitigate the bad — to continue increasing diversity while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the greatest positive impact on the world.

The two most discussed concerns this past year were about diversity of viewpoints we see (filter bubbles) and accuracy of information (fake news). I worry about these and we have studied them extensively, but I also worry there are even more powerful effects we must mitigate around sensationalism and polarization leading to a loss of common understanding.

Social media already provides more diverse viewpoints than traditional media ever has. Even if most of our friends are like us, we all know people with different interests, beliefs and backgrounds who expose us to different perspectives. Compared with getting our news from the same two or three TV networks or reading the same newspapers with their consistent editorial views, our networks on Facebook show us more diverse content.

But our goal must be to help people see a more complete picture, not just alternate perspectives. We must be careful how we do this. Research shows that some of the most obvious ideas, like showing people an article from the opposite perspective, actually deepen polarization by framing other perspectives as foreign. A more effective approach is to show a range of perspectives, let people see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they think is right. Over time, our community will identify which sources provide a complete range of perspectives so that content will naturally surface more.

Accuracy of information is very important. We know there is misinformation and even outright hoax content on Facebook, and we take this very seriously. We’ve made progress fighting hoaxes the way we fight spam, but we have more work to do. We are proceeding carefully because there is not always a clear line between hoaxes, satire and opinion. In a free society, it’s important that people have the power to share their opinion, even if others think they’re wrong. Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation, and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item’s accuracy.

While we have more work to do on information diversity and misinformation, I am even more focused on the impact of sensationalism and polarization, and the idea of building common understanding.

Social media is a short-form medium where resonant messages get amplified many times. This rewards simplicity and discourages nuance. At its best, this focuses messages and exposes people to different ideas. At its worst, it oversimplifies important topics and pushes us towards extremes.

Polarization exists in all areas of discourse, not just social media. It occurs in all groups and communities, including companies, classrooms and juries, and it’s usually unrelated to politics. In the tech community, for example, discussion around AI has been oversimplified to existential fear-mongering. The harm is that sensationalism moves people away from balanced nuanced opinions towards polarized extremes.

If this continues and we lose common understanding, then even if we eliminated all misinformation, people would just emphasize different sets of facts to fit their polarized opinions. That’s why I’m so worried about sensationalism in media.

Fortunately, there are clear steps we can take to correct these effects. For example, we noticed some people share stories based on sensational headlines without ever reading the story. In general, if you become less likely to share a story after reading it, that’s a good sign the headline was sensational. If you’re more likely to share a story after reading it, that’s often a sign of good in-depth content. We recently started reducing sensationalism in News Feed by taking this into account for pieces of content, and going forward signals like this will identify sensational publishers as well. There are many steps like this we have taken and will keep taking to reduce sensationalism and help build a more informed community.

Research suggests the best solutions for improving discourse may come from getting to know each other as whole people instead of just opinions — something Facebook may be uniquely suited to do. If we connect with people about what we have in common — sports teams, TV shows, interests — it is easier to have dialogue about what we disagree on. When we do this well, we give billions of people the ability to share new perspectives while mitigating the unwanted effects that come with any new medium.

A strong news industry is also critical to building an informed community. Giving people a voice is not enough without having people dedicated to uncovering new information and analyzing it. There is more we must do to support the news industry to make sure this vital social function is sustainable — from growing local news, to developing formats best suited to mobile devices, to improving the range of business models news organizations rely on.

Connecting everyone to the internet is also necessary for building an informed community. For the majority of people around the world, the debate is not about the quality of public discourse but whether they have access to basic information they need at all, often related to health, education and jobs.

Finally, I want to emphasize that the vast majority of conversations on Facebook are social, not ideological. They’re friends sharing jokes and families staying in touch across cities. They’re people finding groups, whether they’re new parents raising kids or newly diagnosed patients suffering from a disease together. Sometimes it’s for joy, coming together around religion or sports. And sometimes it’s for survival, like refugees communicating to find shelter.

Whatever your situation when you enter our community, our commitment is to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience. By increasing the diversity of our ideas and strengthening our common understanding, our community can have the greatest positive impact on the world.

Civically-Engaged Community

Our society will reflect our collective values only if we engage in the civic process and participate in self-governance. There are two distinct types of social infrastructure that must be built:

The first encourages engagement in existing political processes: voting, engaging with issues and representatives, speaking out, and sometimes organizing. Only through dramatically greater engagement can we ensure these political processes reflect our values.

The second is establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in collective decision-making. Our world is more connected than ever, and we face global problems that span national boundaries. As the largest global community, Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at scale.

The starting point for civic engagement in the existing political process is to support voting across in the world. It is striking that only about half of Americans eligible to vote participate in elections. This is low compared to other countries, but democracy is receding in many countries and there is a large opportunity across the world to encourage civic participation.

In the United States election last year, we helped more than 2 million people register to vote and then go vote. This was among the largest voter turnout efforts in history, and larger than those of both major parties combined. In every election around the world, we keep improving our tools to help more people register and vote, and we hope to eventually enable hundreds of millions of more people to vote in elections than do today, in every democratic country around the world.

Local civic engagement is a big opportunity as well as national. Today, most of us do not even know who our local representatives are, but many policies impacting our lives are local, and this is where our participation has the greatest influence. Research suggests reading local news is directly correlated with local civic engagement. This shows how building an informed community, supportive local communities, and a civically-engaged community are all related.

Beyond voting, the greatest opportunity is helping people stay engaged with the issues that matter to them every day, not just every few years at the ballot box. We can help establish direct dialogue and accountability between people and our elected leaders. In India, Prime Minister Modi has asked his ministers to share their meetings and information on Facebook so they can hear direct feedback from citizens. In Kenya, whole villages are in WhatsApp groups together, including their representatives. In recent campaigns around the world — from India and Indonesia across Europe to the United States — we’ve seen the candidate with the largest and most engaged following on Facebook usually wins. Just as TV became the primary medium for civic communication in the 1960s, social media is becoming this in the 21st century.

This creates an opportunity for us to connect with our representatives at all levels. In the last few months, we have already helped our community double the number of connections between people and our representatives by making it easier to connect with all our representatives in one click. When we connect, we can engage directly in comments and messages. For example, in Iceland, it’s common to tag politicians in group discussions so they can take community issues to parliament.

Sometimes people must speak out and demonstrate for what they believe is right. From Tahrir Square to the Tea Party — our community organizes these demonstrations using our infrastructure for events and groups. On a daily basis, people use their voices to share their views in ways that can spread around the world and grow into movements. The Women’s March is an example of this, where a grandmother with an internet connection wrote a post that led her friends to start a Facebook event that eventually turned into millions of people marching in cities around the world.

Giving people a voice is a principle our community has been committed to since we began. As we look ahead to building the social infrastructure for a global community, we will work on building new tools that encourage thoughtful civic engagement. Empowering us to use our voices will only become more important.

Inclusive Community

Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.

Facebook is not just technology or media, but a community of people. That means we need Community Standards that reflect our collective values for what should and should not be allowed.

In the last year, the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community. We saw this in errors taking down newsworthy videos related to Black Lives Matter and police violence, and in removing the historical Terror of War photo from Vietnam. We’ve seen this in misclassifying hate speech in political debates in both directions — taking down accounts and content that should be left up and leaving up content that was hateful and should be taken down. Both the number of issues and their cultural importance has increased recently.

This has been painful for me because I often agree with those criticizing us that we’re making mistakes. These mistakes are almost never because we hold ideological positions at odds with the community, but instead are operational scaling issues. Our guiding philosophy for the Community Standards is to try to reflect the cultural norms of our community. When in doubt, we always favor giving people the power to share more.

There are a few reasons for the increase in issues we’ve seen: cultural norms are shifting, cultures are different around the world, and people are sensitive to different things.

First, our community is evolving from its origin connecting us with family and friends to now becoming a source of news and public discourse as well. With this cultural shift, our Community Standards must adapt to permit more newsworthy and historical content, even if some is objectionable. For example, an extremely violent video of someone dying would have been marked as disturbing and taken down. However, now that we use Live to capture the news and we post videos to protest violence, our standards must adapt. Similarly, a photo depicting any child nudity would have always been taken down — and for good reason — but we’ve now adapted our standards to allow historically important content like the Terror of War photo. These issues reflect a need to update our standards to meet evolving expectations from our community.

Second, our community spans many countries and cultures, and the norms are different in each region. It’s not surprising that Europeans more frequently find fault with taking down images depicting nudity, since some European cultures are more accepting of nudity than, for example, many communities in the Middle East or Asia. With a community of almost two billion people, it is less feasible to have a single set of standards to govern the entire community so we need to evolve towards a system of more local governance.

Third, even within a given culture, we have different opinions on what we want to see and what is objectionable. I may be okay with more politically charged speech but not want to see anything sexually suggestive, while you may be okay with nudity but not want to see offensive speech. Similarly, you may want to share a violent video in a protest without worrying that you’re going to bother friends who don’t want to see it. And just as it’s a bad experience to see objectionable content, it’s also a terrible experience to be told we can’t share something we feel is important. This suggests we need to evolve towards a system of personal control over our experience.

Fourth, we’re operating at such a large scale that even a small percent of errors causes a large number of bad experiences. We review over one hundred million pieces of content every month, and even if our reviewers get 99% of the calls right, that’s still millions of errors over time. Any system will always have some mistakes, but I believe we can do better than we are today.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year reflecting on how we can improve our community governance. Sitting here in California, we’re not best positioned to identify the cultural norms around the world. Instead, we need a system where we can all contribute to setting the standards. Although this system is not fully developed, I want to share an idea of how this might work.

The guiding principles are that the Community Standards should reflect the cultural norms of our community, that each person should see as little objectionable content as possible, and each person should be able to share what they want while being told they cannot share something as little as possible. The approach is to combine creating a large-scale democratic process to determine standards with AI to help enforce them.

The idea is to give everyone in the community options for how they would like to set the content policy for themselves. Where is your line on nudity? On violence? On graphic content? On profanity? What you decide will be your personal settings. We will periodically ask you these questions to increase participation and so you don’t need to dig around to find them. For those who don’t make a decision, the default will be whatever the majority of people in your region selected, like a referendum. Of course you will always be free to update your personal settings anytime.

With a broader range of controls, content will only be taken down if it is more objectionable than the most permissive options allow. Within that range, content should simply not be shown to anyone whose personal controls suggest they would not want to see it, or at least they should see a warning first. Although we will still block content based on standards and local laws, our hope is that this system of personal controls and democratic referenda should minimize restrictions on what we can share.

It’s worth noting that major advances in AI are required to understand text, photos and videos to judge whether they contain hate speech, graphic violence, sexually explicit content, and more. At our current pace of research, we hope to begin handling some of these cases in 2017, but others will not be possible for many years.

Overall, it is important that the governance of our community scales with the complexity and demands of its people. We are committed to always doing better, even if that involves building a worldwide voting system to give you more voice and control. Our hope is that this model provides examples of how collective decision-making may work in other aspects of the global community.

This is an important time in the development of our global community, and it’s a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact.

History has had many moments like today. As we’ve made our great leaps from tribes to cities to nations, we have always had to build social infrastructure like communities, media and governments for us to thrive and reach the next level. At each step we learned how to come together to solve our challenges and accomplish greater things than we could alone. We have done it before and we will do it again.

I am reminded of President Lincoln’s remarks during the American Civil War: “We can succeed only by concert. It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we all do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, act anew.”

There are many of us who stand for bringing people together and connecting the world. I hope we have the focus to take the long view and build the new social infrastructure to create the world we want for generations to come.

It’s an honor to be on this journey with you. Thank you for being part of this community, and thanks for everything you do to make the world more open and connected.

Mark”

Founder & Director of TeachThought

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Want to get a job at meta it doesn’t matter what you study—as long as you can ‘do one thing really well,’ mark zuckerberg says.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins a growing number of executives suggesting that a specific field of study is less critical for employment in today’s competitive job market.

What matters most, he says, is being able to "do one thing really well."

When asked by Bloomberg's Emily Chang, “What should kids be studying these days?” Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of critical thinking and learning values.

Rather than pinpointing a particular subject for aspiring Gen Z professionals, the billionaire Harvard dropout stressed that mastering a skill outweighs having a business or economics degree, as such tenacity can be applied across various business areas.

Zuckerberg explained his "hiring philosophy" by pointing to his daughter, who is 40 pages deep into writing a novel about mermaid crystals.

“If people have shown that they can go deep and do one thing really well, then they've probably gained experience in the art of learning something and taking it to an excellent level, which is generally pretty applicable to other things,” he concluded.

Top grades don’t guarantee you’re a top worker

It’s not the first time the Meta mastermind has insisted that raw talent and personality trump credentials.

Zuckerberg was well ahead of today’s skills-first hiring revolution—even back in 2015 , the tech genius was insisting that he “will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person” and that his team looks for people whose values align with the company's.

Now, as businesses increasingly drop degree requirements from their hiring process, Zuckerberg’s hiring philosophy is more common.

Google , Microsoft , IBM , and Apple have all eliminated their long-held degree requirements to remove barriers to entry and recruit more diverse talent. Meanwhile, recruiters globally are five times more likely to search for new hires by skills over higher education.

JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon recently revealed that the Wall Street giant has hired “ four or five thousand ex-felons ” because talent doesn’t just come out of colleges.

“I don’t think necessarily because you go to an Ivy League school or have great grades it means you’re going to be a great worker, great person or something like that,” he said. “If you look at skills of people it is amazing how skilled people are in something, but it didn’t show up on their resume.

Likewise, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has echoed that there is a “mismatch between the skills that are coming out of colleges and what the skills are that we believe we need in the future.”

It’s why he said that aspiring coders, in particular, don’t need a degree to be successful at the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting.

Cisco’s top executive in the U.K., David Meads, dropped out of school at 16 years old . Like Zuckerberg, he told Fortune that “attitude and aptitude are more important than whatever letters you have after your name, or whatever qualifications you’ve got on a sheet.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Mark Zuckerberg Commissioned Daniel Arsham to Make a Sculpture of His Wife in ‘the Roman Tradition’

Has he been thinking too much of the Roman empire?

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg pose for the camera in evening dress

Some guys, as the meme goes , spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman empire. But some have the means to emulate its emperors and highest-flying citizens, and with a net worth of about $181 billion, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one of them.

Zuckerberg has commissioned New York artist Daniel Arsham , best known for a sculptural practice that melds art and architecture, to create a larger-than-life portrait of his wife, philanthropist Priscilla Chan.

“Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife,” wrote Zuckerberg in an Instagram post from Tuesday. “Thanks @danielarsham.”

In the artwork, Chan, depicted in the green hue of an oxidized copper roof, stands about 10 feet tall, stands on an amorphous, flowing base. Wrapped around and billowing behind her is a highly reflective metallic drape, somewhat in the manner of classical sculpture; a short video shows that this part extends dramatically behind her. The soundtrack for the video is a man strumming a guitar and singing the words, “sendin’ all my love to you.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck)

In the photo, Chan herself poses casually, in a bathrobe and sipping from a coffee mug (which matches the green of the sculpture), in front of the artwork, which stands in the couple’s courtyard.

Thousands of commenters are heaping on the praise. Journalist Gayle King asked about the backstory; Zuckerberg responded, “I just try to keep a steady stream of creative projects going. I’ve joked about making a sculpture of her for years and when the opportunity to work with Arsham came up I finally did it!”

Some are less blown away. Entrepreneur Andrew Mwangi dryly commented: “This is the most billionaire thing to do ever.”

Chan, though, is all about it. She shared an Instagram story of the post, captioned, “You can’t miss me!”

The couple met at a party while both were students at Harvard, in 2003. They married in 2012 and have three children.

Many tech giants have been serious art collectors, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison (who focuses on Japanese art), venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (contemporary art), former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (contemporary), Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen (Impressionist, Modern and contemporary), and Bill Gates (American art).

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is known to commission work from contemporary artists, including Baseera Khan and Timur Si-Qin, for its various offices. And the first major ad for Meta took place in an art museum, where paintings by figures such as Henri Rousseau come to life; the company’s video keynote started with Zuckerberg and colleagues bringing a piece of street art to life.

But if Zuckerberg himself has been much of an art collector, it’s been largely kept quiet. Will this be the beginning of an art collection at the level of Allen or Gates? Time will tell.

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More From Forbes

Few & far co-founder sarah dusek is pioneering a female-first sustainable travel movement.

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In the ever-evolving world of sustainable travel, few figures have been as influential as Sarah Dusek . With a career marked by innovation and a commitment to social impact tourism, Dusek has redefined what it means to travel sustainably and responsibly—and become an unassuming champion for female entrepreneurs in the process.

Dusek’s first company, Under Canvas , which she co-founded with her husband, Jacob Dusek, revolutionized the concept of glamping by offering luxurious camping experiences in some of America’s most iconic national parks. It also set a new standard for eco-friendly travel, immediately drawing the attention of celebrity clients, including Madonna, Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Hilary Swank.

The company was recognized by Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, and in 2018, Dusek and her husband sold the business for over $100 million, underscoring the value of their innovative approach to tourism.

For Dusek, this success was merely a stepping stone to her next venture: Enygma Ventures . Founded in 2019, Enygma Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on investing in women-led businesses in Africa. Dusek's motivation for this new direction was clear.

Sarah Dusek

Dusek’s approach goes beyond mere financial investment—she is deeply involved in mentoring these women, helping them navigate the challenges of scaling businesses in often difficult economic environments. Over the last three years, Enygma Ventures, has provided $10 million in critical funding and support to 14 female-led African businesses over the last three years in sectors including consumer goods, branded products, education, tech, and e-commerce. “What we've seen is what an extraordinary community can be born amongst the female entrepreneurs who've been invested in, which is so exciting to see because they've become their own sort of cheerleading squad for each other,” Dusek says.

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Earlier this year, the company was recognized as a top impact company by Real Leaders, and Dusek was announced as one of the 2023 Meaningful Business top 100 leaders , which celebrates outstanding business leaders helping to achieve the UN Global Goals.

Dusek’s work with Enygma Ventures reflects a broader commitment to sustainable travel. This used to be more about minimizing harm through things like choosing eco-friendly accommodations or reducing your carbon footprint. Now, Dusek notes, the industry has evolved beyond—these days, it’s more and more about renewal and regeneration.

Sarah and Jake Dusek.

This is the concept at the heart of Dusek’s new venture with her husband, Few & Far —a travel company that aims to bring the sustainable safari experience to life with carbon-neutral immersive journeys and eco-minded accommodation in remote parts of the world, including the Peruvian Amazon, the Botswana Bush, and the Italian Dolomites—as well as some North American destinations.

While Under Canvas focused on sustainable travel, Few & Far is about ‘regenerative travel’—this means everything from low energy usage, zero-waster, solar and off-the-grid power, a limited land footprint, and working with local communities, business owners, and purveyors in rural areas and emerging countries.

Central to Few & Far’s philosophy is the concept of rewilding—an approach that aims to restore ecosystems to their natural states. Rewilding involves activities like reintroducing native species, allowing rivers to flow freely, and supporting the natural processes that sustain biodiversity. Dusek believes that travel should contribute to these efforts, not just passively observe them.

To that end, Dusek collaborates with female-led, sustainable travel companies across Africa who are pioneering rewilding projects. These initiatives allow travelers to engage directly in conservation efforts, from planting trees to assisting in the reintroduction of endangered species. Slated to open in Q1 2025, Few & Far will debut its first-ever eco-lodge, Few & Far Luvhondo , a biophilic 60-room experiential luxury lodge located atop South Africa’s Forgotten Mountains within UNESCO’s Vhembe Biosphere Reserve , one of the world’s most biologically diverse regions.

Beyond her entrepreneurial and environmental endeavors, Dusek is also an influential voice in the global dialogue on business and sustainability. Her new book, Thinking Bigger A Pitch-Deck Formula for Women Who Want to Change the World , is currently available for pre-order before officially launching on September 2 this year. As the global travel industry continues to evolve, her work serves as a blueprint for how business can be a force for good.

Few & Far Luvhongo in South Africa.

Read more from our conversation with Dusek below.

Sarah, you've had an incredible journey finding Under Canvas to now leaving for Few & Far. Can you tell us the inspiration behind Few & Far and how it builds upon your experience with Under Canvas? What lessons from your previous ventures have you applied to your new company?

Well, the way I feel about Few & Far, it is our next iteration—and next evolution—of Under Canvas. I say that because when we founded Under Canvas, we set out to do a couple of different things, including making the outdoors accessible for folks to experience in comfort and style and enabling people to get out without having to go camping. Secondly, our goal was to build a sustainable company that has a minimal footprint, using limited resources that are as green as possible. Those were the two drivers. How can we do something that's green, environmentally friendly, leaves no trace, and at the same time, allows people to have access to the outdoors?

Few & Far is on its own journey. It's taking sustainable luxury travel to the next level and is very much centered on our desire to take people into the wilderness, outdoors, and extraordinary places around the world. With Few & Far, now we're thinking globally as opposed to just domestically, and we're also thinking about five-star experiences as opposed to four-star by elevating the hospitality experience from where we've been to where we would like to go.

Lastly, from an environmental sustainability standpoint, I'm no longer thinking about just building a sustainable company. I don't want to have a company that is not doing things in terms of not using single-use plastic, creating a minimal impact or using low-flow fixtures to use less water, and so on. That's sort of the bare minimum that we should all be thinking about doing in terms of how we build and how we create what kind of companies we want.

I'm now thinking about how we build a regenerative company. For me, regeneration means giving back, it means investing, it means building and not taking things away. So, within Under Canvas, it was trying to do less: meaning less resources, less energy, less footprint, etc. Now, I'm thinking about how we do more. How do we invest in the planet? How do we create solutions to environmental issues? For us, that means focusing on carbon and creating a carbon-negative approach to building.

There is one really unique hotel that's just been designated in Denver to be the first carbon-negative hotel in the United States. They've done that by planting a whole bunch of trees to offset the carbon footprint. We want to build projects that create hospitality experiences that are in a similar vein, restoring pristine wilderness and moving places from degraded wilderness areas to restored wilderness areas. For us means replanting and focusing on investing in carbon sequestration by rewilding and replanting an area.

With Under Canvas, we learned just how important our mission was to us from the beginning, and it helped us build a very strong, very focused team. I think the same will be true now with Few & Far. We are zeroed in on our goals, which are not just financial. Most companies are adding ESG as an add-on, but for us, our environmental and social commitment is at the heart of why we're building a company. I am building a company because I want to invest in saving the planet, and I want to take people on magical adventures as a sideline. That's the nature of this beast for us.

A Few & Far destination camp in the Serengeti.

Few & Far is set to open its first eco-lodge in South Africa’s Vhembe Biosphere Reserve in 2025. Can you describe the unique aspects of this location and how the lodge will integrate sustainable and regenerative practices to protect and enhance this biodiversity hotspot?

The Soutpansberg Mountain Range is about 100,000 acres in Limpopo in South Africa. We are hoping to create not just a very unique hospitality experience, but the first of its kind in South Africa. We are also hoping to restore and rewild the degraded areas of the mountain by replanting.

We are in the midst of a carbon project, which means we have an active registered Carbon Project with Verra—one of the registering bodies for carbon initiatives and carbon projects. We will actively measure our carbon sequestration from where we are now to what we're hoping to achieve year after year, after year, after year. This will be a 50-year project. It's not a five-minute wonder, but a five to seven-year implementation phase, and then 43 years of growing trees, growing the biosphere, protecting the biodiversity of this region for hopefully generations to come.

It is an environmental project at its core. I think one of the unique things about the location is that it's off the beaten track. It's an absolutely, unbelievably, incredibly diverse mountain range. It's got more biodiversity than the whole of Europe, with something like over 400 species of trees, 189 different species of insects, and a similar number of different butterflies. It is extraordinary, and it hasn't been protected up until now. This project will be a big, concerted effort to put this whole mountain range into protection and into a management initiative that will see it restored.

To that end, we have realized there are plenty of places to go on safari in South Africa. We are doing a couple of things to put this experience on the map: one of which is to reimagine the safari experience. Obviously, the safari experience has been what it's been for hundreds of years. We are always trying to push the envelope; we are always trying to reimagine something, reinvent something.

For us, that means a heavy reliance on solar power, and we want our guests to traverse the bush without using fossil fuels wherever possible. My husband Jacob Dusek has designed an incredible cable car experience—which we're calling “Solfari”—that will transport our guests through the bush in a very magical cable car that will enable you to see the wildlife and the mountains and traverse in a different way.

You're also going to be able to be very active, as on the mountain, there'll be a lot of hiking and biking. Although we still have leopards and buffalos, one of the benefits of not having lions is that you can physically get out of the car. Being able to put your feet on the ground and experience being out in the bush without having to be in a vehicle all the time will be really unique and magical. You will be able to get up close and personal in the bush and experience it in a much more hands-on way.

A Few & Far destination lodge in Rwanda.

The eco-lodge promises to be a “biophilic masterpiece.” What does that mean? Can you tell us more about the design and architectural principles behind this project and how they reflect the ethos of Few & Far?

Well, biophilic means to me, sort of connecting people to nature and a direct connection with nature. The whole camp has been designed with nature in mind. All of the materials that we're building with have been sustainably and locally produced by our own folks in our own manufacturing factory, and there's a very connected story with the building and design of the lodge.

Your company is at the forefront of redefining the sustainable safari experience. How does Few & Far distinguish itself in the realm of impact tourism, particularly in terms of low energy usage, carbon neutrality, and zero waste initiatives?

I've talked quite a lot about carbon neutrality, and at Few & Far, we're effectively trying to be carbon-negative, which means we're creating a lot more carbon than we're using at the lodge. Zero waste was a focus we were going with at Under Canvas when I was CEO.

Zero waste, for me, is an absolute imperative, and we don't want to create any more waste than is absolutely necessary. The whole philosophy of the lodge will be about circular usage, re-usage, and locally sustainable production. We're growing most of our food either at our own farm kitchen garden or leveraging our local farmers around us. We want our food miles to be very minimal. The whole property will be on solar power, including the cable car.

The idea is: Can we protect this unique area while also creating jobs? Can we provide sustenance for many of the hundreds of families who live in this area? Can we create opportunities not just for employment but also for engagement with a larger community by buying from local producers and suppliers, using their products to connect them to our guests, and creating a cultural exchange?

There are so many ways that this lodge will be so critical for the whole region, especially for the Johannesburg region, in terms of impact, and I think one of the things I have realized, even over the last five years since I've been mostly living in South Africa, has been just how connected social impact and environmental impact is. We try to do our best to environmentally sustain an area, but, if we can do that and uplift the local community at the same time, then we're on to a winner.

That's the idea really behind this—can we connect local folks, can we create a whole tourism industry for this area that lifts not only our property but also dozens and dozens of other properties, people, and communities around us? Few & Far places a strong emphasis on social consciousness, economic impact, and more.

On safari near a Few & Far destination lodge in Africa.

Can you elaborate on the initiatives you have implemented to support local purveyors and create job opportunities in the communities where your lodges are located?

Supporting our local communities is absolutely fundamental to us. We have to create jobs and train local people to work for us and sustain their livelihoods off the mountain. We want to support local purveyors.

Can we connect with indigenous communities to allow them to show off their cultural handicraft? Can we allow them to showcase their dances and their songs to our guests?

I was recently inspired on a trip where I took a group of women to Rwanda and we all had porters to go and trek the mountain to see the gorillas. Obviously, none of us really needed porters; we are all relatively fit. But they said if you don't take a porter, that he or she has lost their income for the day. So actually, having someone walk alongside us to hold our hand, carry a bag, drag you up the mountain when you needed help, was actually really, really beneficial, and the social impact of that is incredible.

I would love to see us replicate something like that idea in Rwanda, which, you know, creating porter jobs and the ability to engage with guests while uplifting a whole community would be so extraordinary and so exciting to see.

Local activities during a Few & Far destination trip in the Serengeti.

Your rewilding efforts are quite impressive. Can you explain what active rewilding entails and share some examples of the projects you are currently undertaking to restore and regenerate the land?

Rewilding is simple. It basically means replanting. For our Carbon Project on the mountain, we have narrowed it down now to planting six or seven different types of trees, and then over particular areas, making sure that we've replanted in an area that's been designated as degraded, as it has virtually no trees or grasses.

We’re looking at tree planting, grassland planting, shrub management, invasive species removal, and brush clearing; all of these ideas are what we're talking about when we refer to rewilding because, basically, we are trying to restore an area to what it would have looked like originally, bringing the land back to what it should look like and to restore it to its natural state.

Obviously, if you don't manage land well, you get invasive species taking over. We often lose habitats and lose biodiversity, and key species that should be in an area.

Empowering female entrepreneurs across Africa is a significant part of your mission with Enygma Ventures. What inspired you to focus on this area, and can you share some success stories from the businesses you’ve supported?

What inspired it was being a female entrepreneur myself, having started my career in Africa over 25 years ago. I started as an AIDS worker in Zimbabwe doing health initiatives and AIDS education back in the early 2000s. What I realized as I transitioned from working in nonprofits to starting and running my own business was that, actually, business has the power to get to the root of a problem and solve a deep problem.

I became a believer that business could be a vehicle for doing good, driving change, and create a much more significant impact potentially than a nonprofit could ever do. We launched Enygma Ventures on the basis of believing that businesses are the backbone of any economy and that if you want to transform developing nations if you want to help them catch up, the best way to do that is to invest in the people and enable them to build businesses, businesses that drive impact, businesses that solve problems, businesses that will generate revenue that will build an economy.

I am a female entrepreneur, and I know just how difficult it is for female entrepreneurs to get funded and just how little funding goes to women. And I know just how much women care. When you invest in a woman, she invests in her community, she invests in her family, she invests in the world in which she lives, and everything changes around her. So is investing in women not only a good financial bet but it's also a good community bet in terms of seeing the ripple effects that women having access to capital and creating revenue has in any community.

And so it was this idea of, could we help empower female entrepreneurs? Could we empower them to be builders of their cities and their nations? And could we help build a continent by investing in our people and championing them to build big businesses? So we've invested in 14 companies over the last three years and have deployed about $10 million. And we have invested in all sorts of sectors from consumer goods, branded products, to education, tech, to some AI, some FinTech, some e-commerce platforms, I mean, so many different things. And what we've seen is what an extraordinary community can be born amongst the female entrepreneurs who've been invested in, which is so exciting to see because they've become their own sort of cheerleading squad for each other. But also some real problems are being overcome.

Even just over the last few years, I can see an enormous benefit from backing women and starting to see women have an impact on their environment and their society—the world around them is starting to change. This is making me realize that my philosophy about investing in women to build a continent is definitely not wrong. I can see it happening with my own eyes; we just need to pour more money into investing in incredibly talented, amazing female entrepreneurs to help them grow and scale their businesses. And if we can do that, we'll change a continent within my lifetime, for sure.

Few & Far's newest lodge in Luvhongo, South Africa.

I’d love to hear more from you about Few & Far’s upcoming “The Unknown Experience”—a new take on the mystery trip concept. What was the inspiration behind this, experience, and how much of a role do you personally play in designing the itinerary?

I'm still very personally involved in designing all our itineraries. All the itineraries you can see on our website have been inspired because I have done every single one of those trips.

With our mystery trips, I am very, very excited to do something that I don't think has been done before. There's a phrase in the hospitality-induced industry called surprise and delight; we're always talking about how we surprise and delight our guests in terms of creating an incredible experience. We want to take that one step further with really surprising and delighting you. And I think there are very few surprises left in life.

All of our trips, for me, are about having very magical, very unique experiences in the outdoors. I want us to be wined and dined and amazed by the places and the experiences that we can have out in nature. I don't think there are any more incredible experiences to be had other than when you're out in the outdoors. I know being in the outdoors is incredibly inspiring.

It's so uplifting, its energy rebooting, it's clear-headed thinking it's so many things to me. And we've wanted to just create different opportunities for people to experience that. And with the unknown experience, we want to take it to another level; we want to surprise and delight you and create extraordinary magic for you in ways you couldn't have imagined for yourself.

Part of the unknown experiences idea is also to just take all the hard work out of you going on an extraordinary trip and trust us to take you somewhere that we believe that you will love and that we believe you will just absolutely be delighted by and surprised by and take the pressure off. We know where you should go and what you should do, and you just go blind. I've been doing this for my friends and family for the last five years, and now we want to do it for others and just keep raising the bar. I think what participants can expect from such an unpredictable journey is every day to feel that childlike wonder, mystery, and sense of delight that many of us rarely ever feel anymore.

A Few & Far lodge.

How does the mystery trip concept align with your philosophy of adventure and liberation through travel? I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the psychology of a mystery trip — what is it about ceding control that we, as travelers and humans, find so tantalizing?

It connects back to what I was just saying about childlike wonder, of being able to entrust your life to someone else, to release control, to release the pressure and the burden of having to be in charge and having to make your own sign and allow someone else to curate that for you.

Most of us live with very, very high degrees of control over everything these days. Part of being a child is the wonder of not having to be in control, not having to be in charge, not having to be responsible, and allowing play and magic and delight to be your best place.

This is what that's all about—you can take off the pressure of having to be the manufacturer of the controller of everything, after and especially for women, right? Isn't it mostly women who make almost all of the travel decisions for their families? Can we just have a break from having to be in charge of all of that and allow someone else to take responsibility for just making magic happen for you? I know that is what I am looking for when I go on a trip.

At a Few & Far lodge in Rwanda.

Few & Far's commitment to regenerative travel is a few steps beyond traditional sustainable tourism. How do you envision the future of travel and tourism, and what role do you see Few & Far playing in leading this transformation?

The only reason to create a company, for me, is to pioneer and lead and define, redefine, solve problems, and drive change. That's the reason to be in business. For me, there is no other reason to be in business. As far as I'm concerned, making money is just a byproduct.

And so I think you can expect to see us leading a conversation, I think you can expect us to see us set a new bar, that we hope other people will rise to the challenge to meet. And I truly believe competition is always good for us in terms of, when someone else does something better, it's up to the rest to keep up and do something else better.

I want us to be part of a journey that says being sustained by having sustainable tourism is no longer where it's at. Now we're trying to be regenerative. Now we're trying to invest in the future, build the future with travel dollars, and drive the change we want to see. And for any company, I think if we were all really focused on just driving the change that we wanted, our world would be an infinitely better place. And so, my heart and soul are to use Few & Far as a platform and a vehicle that allows us to drive the change that we want to see and will focus on building a better world.

I'm hoping that will bring others on the journey with us and that will set new bars, set new expectations of what normal is. That in itself will be a bit of a revolution. That is my hope.

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Engadget Podcast: Pixel 9 Pro Fold hands-on thoughts

Just don't call it the pixel fold 2..

Is the second time the charm for Google's foldable? In this episode, Devindra chats with Senior Writer Sam Rutherford about his hands-on impressions of the new Pixel 9 Pro Fold. It has bigger screens and a sleeker design than its predecessor, but how does it compare to the other foldables out there? And why isn't it called the Pixel Fold 2?!

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News !

Thoughts on Google’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold and the rest of Google’s event – 1:39

Eric Schmidt blames work from home and work-life balance for Google’s loss of AI advantage – 31:07

U.S. Department of Justice considering breaking up Google after monopoly ruling – 33:32

Hackers may have leaked every American’s Social Security Number – 38:04

Meta officially shuts down CrowdTangle, a critical tool for monitoring misinformation on Facebook – 40:50

Apple is opening up its NFC to third-party developers – 43:12

Working on – 47:13

Pop Culture Picks – 49:07

Pocket Casts

Google Podcasts

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Sam Rutherford Producer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Devindra: What's up, Internet, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar. This week I'm joined by scene writer Sam Rutherford. Hey, Sam. Hey, how you doing? Doing okay. And we got you here to talk more about, the Google devices, but specifically the new Pixel 9 Pro Fold, a name that I hate.

I know you hate it, too. We'll talk about why. That's kind of messy. And also, some of your, you know, further thoughts from the Google event, Sam. Cherlynn and I did do, a post event. Chat that went for an hour that there's a live stream. There's an episode on the podcast feed about that too. So if you want to hear broader thoughts about the pixel nine event, the made by Google event, go check it out there.

How do you think it went overall, Sam?

Sam: I think Google is not already really great about protecting its leaks. and you know, they even got to the point where you know, Hey, we're just going to tease the new stuff, you know, months ahead of time, because. Hey, if we release it, then it's not a leak.

A lot of people may be getting a little tired of this at this point, but obviously the big focus again was on AI. So we got, you know, some new AI features, some new AI camera features and some other stuff. And on one hand, like I can see the fatigue setting in, but on the other hand, it's you know, Hey, Google is you know, the more, every, every time they have one of these events and they add new AI features, they're really kind of filling out that like suite of AI powered software features tools.

And it's okay. And it's after a while, it's wow, there's just so many things. And obviously it can be difficult because. Yeah. There's a lot of things for the consumer or, you know, new buyers to like sort through, but at the same time, there's just, there's a lot of different, you know, versatility there to talk about.

Devindra: It's a, it was a pretty big event. we'll talk about what worked and what didn't. I will say upfront folks, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcast of choice. Leave us a review on iTunes, drop us an email at [email protected]. I want to hear your feedback and join us Thursdays, typically around 1045 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel where we do the live stream.

sometimes we'll have devices, but we'll always do Q and A with people. So if you want to chat directly with us and if you've got questions about the latest news, that's a good thing to join in for. It was kind of a wild event, Sam, but I think one thing that was interesting is that it was actually a live event, right?

It was not just a pre recorded video like Apple does. Samsung is still doing live events now too, but Samsung doesn't typically do like onstage demos of new software. And that's something Google tried to do and it didn't work out all the time. There, there's good and bad to that, right? Like the, the first demo we saw, which was something of a, you know, capturing information, comparing it to your calendar.

Basically, somebody took a photo of something at was asking the, you know, Gemini, am I free for this? Can you add this to my calendar? It failed three times. It took 60 seconds. What did you think about just that demo? Because it seemed like a big failure of the whole idea of AI assistance.

Sam: There's the pros and cons. Obviously, you know, anytime it's like the curse of live demos, right. That, that, that struck Google again, this kind of always happens anytime someone gets bold enough to try to do a live demo, but at the same time, after that initial flub, they did a lot more live demos throughout the live stream.

And they all ran pretty smooth except for one issue with the reimagined feature, which kind of, you know, uses prompts to replace backgrounds or foregrounds and subjects, you know, they had one example of look kind of wonky, but you know, because they had multiple choices, multiple results for that feature.

They were just able to swipe to the next one. And it's Oh, Hey, that looks pretty good. and so I think, you know, once again, you're seeing the fallibility of AI. Just a, sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes it times out. I mean, it's also hard to know. That's you know, was that, you know, a pre production software thing?

Was that just a simple bug? Was it a connection issue? So it's hard to tell. but at the same time, I think once they kind of, you know, got on board with everything, it did show you that Hey, a lot of these things are happening on device and they're pretty fast. It just sucks that I guess for them that it was kind of marred by the initial flub of, you know, You know, the live bug demo.

Devindra: Yeah, there was like a multiple attempt flub to and it took a while and it was a little awkward. So that's not the best way to kick off a live event, right? It's

Sam: just, you know, it's hard to deal with when you're just sitting there waiting for something to happen. Then it kind of comes out.

Devindra: It's a nightmare.

I felt, I felt embarrassed for that person, but also listen, it would have been also pretty easy if you just looked at your calendar and used your brain to match the information on that picture. yeah, they're trying to sell us ways that AI could make our lives easier. And it still seems like in some ways, just doing, looking at your calendar, doing something manually could be easier and faster.

So I guess we'll, we'll see where all this goes. I really want to talk about the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Sam. So you did the hands on, go check out the Sam's coverage of that and the video of that, I really got stuck, held up just with the name of this thing because we were all expecting a pixel fold to or something like that.

Clean, simple, a sequel to the pixel fold. I think it's not a great name for a device like this. It may not matter in the long run, but what do you think, Sam?

Sam: No, I completely agree. It's not a great name, but at least from Google's perspective, here's the rationale. The rationale is that. They just announced a whole bunch of pixel nine phones.

We got the pixel nine, the pixel nine pro, which is a new size. It's the smaller version of the pro, but you still get that, you know, optical zoom camera. And then you have the pixel nine pro XL, which is the big flagship that we've had before, but just kind of get us tweaked XL name on that. And so they really wanted the pixel nine pro fold for people to know that it's part of the rest of the pixel family.

So it still has the same tensor G4 chip. All the same AI features, you know, very similar display specs, similar design language. And so really that's the whole from their rationale. They want people to know that the pro fold is part of the pixel 9 family and that's why you can't get that convoluted name.

Devindra: I totally get it. But it also seems like Google brain stuff to you and we're seeing responses in the chat. hey, just get over the name. Yeah, ultimately probably doesn't matter, but we're asking you to think a little deeper here. And it does seem endemic of the way Google handles consumer products in general.

It's not a clean name. I don't think it really matters if people know if it's part of the Pixel 9 family or not, because it is a foldable. It's the newest foldable. A lot of people would assume it'll have the latest Hardaware, calling it Pixel. And then you can't just call it the Pixel 9 fold.

Because it's more than the pixel line. It's pro. So then you're just adding all these things. It feels like big engineer brain mistake to be like, we got to make sure it all fits into the product family rather than the way human may. Yeah, it's one of those things where I think someone

Sam: could have just been at Google be like, Hey, let's just keep it simple and land on something a little cleaner.

But I think this is actually maybe an overcorrection from last year. Because if you remember last year, the pixel fold came out before the pixelate family. Right. And it had a worse chip, you know, had the tensor G2. and so I think that's, I think it's really kind of an overcorrection on that kind of unforced error from the previous year.

and so I guess that's where we're at. you know, for me, I'm just going to call it the pro folds. Maybe hopefully we get You know, a pro fold 10, and then maybe they kind of rearranged that, next year we'll see, but yeah, that's, that's kind of where we're at the whole

Devindra: thing. So what is new this year?

you had a really great write up, Sam, where it basically looks like this thing is a lot more polished. The screens are bigger and it seems like they solved a lot of the problems from the original pixel fold, right?

Sam: Yeah. I mean, I, I kind of love the shape of the original pixel fold just because it's, it's so unique.

It has that you know, almost passport shaped. Dimensions. But for the pro fold, Google actually did something really clever is like their whole goal with the original pixel fold was to make the outside screen more usable. And they did that by making it a little bit wider, a little bit shorter, a little, kind of a little bit squattier.

But this year, what they did is basically took an outside screen. That's almost exactly the same size as the standard pixel nine. And it looks like

Devindra: exactly the same screen, which would be easier to build

Sam: too. I think in the video, I hold it up and you can see it's almost exactly the same size. And so if you're talking about an outside screen, that's usable.

Well, there you go. You can't like, no, one's ever going to say that the pixel nine screen is not usable and that's exactly pretty much what you're getting on the pro fold. And then, that also sidesteps another issue, small issue, that you had on the original pixelfold, is that because when you open it up, The flexible main screen was a, in landscape mode, there were some sites and some apps that just, they kind of freak out because they don't understand a phone.

That's default landscape mode because everything else is portrait mode. And so you would sometimes have to rotate the phone into portrait mode and then you'd get a landscape view. And it was just a weird experience. It didn't happen very often, but when it did, you're like, well, that's just unusual. And so you'd have to get over that.

So by having that main display now in the pro fold in portrait mode, by default, it's pretty much like all the other foldables on the net. So it's from a developer's perspective, it's a lot easier for, you know, compatibility thing.

Devindra: Developers hate awkward or different screen sizes, right? They do

Sam: not updating their apps just for a single device.

Devindra: So, yeah, so it's like more in line. Now, what is interesting about the pixel nine pro fold is that, Yeah, that outside screen, you could just live on that all the time. And then occasionally pop it open and do the big screen. Whereas I think the argument for a lot of foldables before was you've got basic information on the front screen, but you really want to always be open most of the time.

I feel like Google has struck an interesting balance here. Yeah, it's sort of a subtle design shift where

Sam: they're kind of acknowledging that. I think people, it's more of a 50 50 scenario where like you're using the outside screen 50 percent of the time and using that main screen 50 percent of the time or some somewhere in that ballpark.

And so both the screen sizes and aspect ratios of both displays are super important. Some other small design changes is that Google is claiming that it's the thinnest foldable on the market at about 5. 1 millimeters. That's not actually true. because both the Xiaomi Mix Fold 4 and the Honor Magic V3.

Are slightly thinner, like less than a millimeter thinner. So you're, you're really hedging. I think, you know, that they mean us market,

Devindra: right? Yeah. In the

Sam: U S market, that claim still holds true. And then the main display is now also eight inches from corner to corner, which is up from about 7. 6 ish. so it's bigger than the Z fold six, and bigger than, you know, the one plus open and stuff like that.

Although I think there is a. Maybe one Chinese foldable or two that is slightly bigger. So once again, they're kind of just talking about us, availability in terms of like biggest screen, thinnest foldable, and whatnot.

Devindra: And eight inch internal screen is pretty massive. that's just, yeah, you are fully a tablet at that point.

I think, how is the screen crease? Cause that is the thing that always gets me about a full I mean, it's still there.

Sam: No, no company has completely gotten rid of it. there, there's some arguments on the laptop side where, you know, Maybe they have done it, but it's to me, especially like I'm, I'm, you know, I'm a little biased because I've been using foldables for so long.

It's like the whole matrix thing. I do not even see the crease there. It's does not exist to me. so I guess that's where it's at. If you are the kind of person, it's, it's one of those things where like you have to try it and then you realize. Oh, the crease does not actually matter at all, but you know, from an outspite perspective, if that thing bugs you, it's going to still bug you now because it is visible.

Technically.

Devindra: I've got to actually, when it comes to like video watching, I'm, I imagine if I'm full screening a video on that, it's good. It's going right to the middle of the screen, like with the screen, with the crease in between, but I guess you could conceivably. Yeah. Have the video running at the top of the screen and have stuff at the bottom and maybe avoid you honestly

Sam: only really notice it when you're viewing it from a really acute angle, anything close to like head on where like you're holding the phone in front of your face like you normally would, you won't really see it and it's even less noticeable in like darker environments like inside You know, if you're outside doors, you know, you're going to use that, but you're probably using the exterior screen when you're outdoors, walking around anyways.

Devindra: Yeah. I imagine it's more I think about how I use devices with kids now. Right. And having something like that, like juggling a, a thicker device, like I will, if I'm running around with the kids outside, I could never open that phone and use it as a tablet, but I want it to be durable.

I want it to feel like a typical phone. How is the design otherwise? Cause I feel like the pixel nine design this year for Google is a little Is a big step up. Like the camera bar is less ugly. It's less prominent. It's almost like a pill. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of stuff on

Sam: that are, are so divided because it's some people really love the camera bar and they kind of got rid of that now, now it's just like a It's a pill shaped module and, you know, I kind of likened it to the, you know, now it really looks like an among us character, but Hey, there's, you know, that's whatever.

but you know, Google is saying that it's twice as durable as before. you're getting Gorilla Glass Victus 2 front and back. you know, and you can argue, almost argue that they're kind of borrowing a little bit of Apple's styling because it has, you know, kind of flat boxy sides. less, you know, it doesn't have the tapered rounded edges like we've gotten on the, you know, Past, Pixel Pro versions at least.

and so I think I personally, I kind of like it. but beauty is in the eye of the beholder as always.

Devindra: I think there's some objective things you can point to be like, well, this is a little more polished than before. Even if you, even if you love the camera bar, I pixel nine because I ended up writing up that news.

It does seem like the sleekest pixel ever made. Google has finally figured out some material issues and some like design elements to. Make something that looks a lot more modern than the old pixel six design, which we've kind of been iterating on for the past several years, just with the camera bar and everything.

Sam: Yeah. And I think, I think this is a good evolution of right, of the pixel six design, which they have been kind of iterating on for three generations. And now we're kind of getting something new. So. I think this is a nice kind of bridge in between those two kind of the directions.

Devindra: Yeah. And you play with a lot of foldables, Sam.

You use a lot of foldables or don't you mean, the latest galaxy fold?

Sam: or I, I just wrote, a kind of one year durability on the pixel fold. So if, you know, go check out the site for that. How does

Devindra: this compare? you know, what, is it that much better? Does it feel better? Does it look better? Cause that screen looks great too.

Yeah. And one of

Sam: those things, like I said, I originally, I was like, really, I really liked the shape of the pixel fold, but the new, design of the pro fold is definitely growing on me. The one thing that I'm still trying to figure out, nail down, confirm for sure is that it doesn't look like they changed the sensors, the camera sensors on, from the pixel fold to the pro fold.

and I, I just really wish they did that because even though you know, when I recently reviewed the Z fold six, the pixel fold is already a better camera offers better image quality than Samsung's foldable. But I really don't, you know, I don't want Google to do the thing where like. They're kind of, passing the buck between generations on the foldable because it's like, Oh, we don't want to update the sensors.

We did it last year. And then you're waiting two years, between, you know, sensor upgrade.

Devindra: Has Google confirmed that? Cause I know you guys reached out to them.

Sam: About we're still, you know, we're still waiting on review devices and confirmation on that. So, you know, by the time a review is out, we'll know for sure.

Devindra: It's one of those things. I feel like Google has been really cagey about this release in general, right? these devices aren't shipping with Android 15. That feels like a pretty big, big thing, right? I guess they're just coming too early for the release of Android 15. And this, this event is basically two months earlier than when they typically do it.

We typically get pixel stuff in October, right? So it feels like they want to preempt Apple, but how do you feel about running older Android at this point?

Sam: I think that might also be a kind of like correction from previous last year and the year before we, there was kind of some like software bugginess that, you know, popped up around, you know, at the rollout of previous Android versions, especially on the pixel.

And then you know, we saw in like last year on November, December and into the new year, like they had to release some extra patches to kind of shore up the bugs. And so if this means that we're going to get less buggy releases of Android, especially when they come to the pixel. I'm kind of okay with it.

And especially for this year where there weren't any like groundbreaking overhauls to Android itself. I'm, you know, I'm not, I'm not too upset.

Devindra: I feel like they're also more interested in the upgrades coming through Gemini and a lot of that will be on Android 14 and eventually in Android 15, but you don't need Android 15 to get a lot of the AI stuff they're hyping up.

So it's almost like a weird separation between the AI software and the base software and the base software will matter less and less, I guess.

Sam: Yeah, and I think all the mobile OS's are so mature at this point that you're, you're looking for better stability and, you know, can you get new feature drops, you know, Google's been really good about doing regular feature drops.

And so I think that isn't going to change. And so that I think it, they're kind of striking, maybe a better balance. And in some ways, this puts more of the focus on the Hardaware and the new features on the phones. And so if you're really interested in that, that's great. And then, Hey, you get kind of like a second present later when Android 15 arrives.

Devindra: Yeah, definitely. we saw the news about, AT& T is not going to be carrying the pixel nine pro fold. Is that, do you feel like that's surprising or does this, I think it just kind of makes sense for like a big carrier where many people won't be buying a super a 1799 foldable.

Sam: Yeah. I think when we're talking about foldables, I think it makes sense because AT& T doesn't release, you know, sales numbers, per device, but I can't imagine they were selling through that many and when you, you know, talking about, you know, a company that has thousands of retail locations and suddenly they have to train their, you know, their salespeople and their technicians on, you know, how to educate the customer about these phones.

And they have to get, you know, by display units to put in a certain number of stores. I think it kind of makes sense that like for a foldable, most foldable people, at least me in the past, you know, if I'm going to buy a foldable, I'm going to buy directly from the manufacturer. And so I think a lot of foldable people are like that.

And so it's not really a huge loss. And then, you know, AT& T might actually be saving money by not carrying the fold. That one thing is that this also sort of suggests that, you know, overall market share of foldables isn't super hot and that's a little disappointing, but like you said, that kind of goes back to the pricing issue where.

You know, the pro fold cost the same as the last one, 1, 800. It is a hundred dollars less than the Z fold six. I'm not sure how much that is going to matter ultimately. Cause they're both really expensive. Yeah. Yeah. but we'll, we'll see. I, I'm actually, you know, a little bit more positive on how, you know, the pixel, nine pro fold stacks up against the Z fold six.

even though the Z fold does have a few features like style support and Dex mode that aren't really available on, you know, Google's version.

Devindra: You know, I've, I've spent a lot of money on smartphones. Like I ended up getting the 15 pro max with a decent amount of storage, but I still like close to 2, 000 for foldable is like a killer thing.

And, you know, when Apple does it too, it's not going to be, they're going to look at the competition may even be more expensive than everybody else. we've talked about the Z flip and how the sort of like. Portrait style foldables that flip down like the razor as well. Those are getting more inexpensive.

You know, those are under a thousand dollars now and seem like approachable, like a typical smartphone. Do you think that style of foldable is just catching on better because of the price?

Sam: I definitely think there's a way more runway just simply because like you said, the price, and I think it also taps into a slightly different kind of maybe less techie audience because both Samsung and Motorola are, You know, kind of making more stylish, fashionable plays with both of those phones.

Motorola even has a thing where you can hold the phone up to like your, your shirt or your pants or whatever, and it will take a picture. And then I'll make the background of your phone match the pattern on your clothes, which is just like completely unnecessary. But Hey, if you're really into styling out and going full matchy matchy, that's kind of cool.

And he's in, especially on Motorola's case, you can get. The lower tier, a new razor for, I think, 800 wild. And then you get a thousand for the razor plus, and then the Z flip six is that I think 1100. so yeah, those are a lot more affordable, but like you said, I really wish that we would get a kind of a similar price reduction on the big foldables because 1, 800, it's just out of reach for a lot of people.

And I think I've been noticing more people like out in the world using foldables. And so I think there's is an untapped market, but not until they get the prices down

Devindra: at probably at least under 1500 because Apple basically helped push smartphone prices beyond 1, 000 with the their max phones. I think we were all like, Oh man, are we getting to that point?

Because for a while it felt like we were at a really good spot where 500 phones could be pretty good and do everything you want them. Apple just had to push the price up. And one plus was

Sam: kind of scratching that itch with the open last year where it was 1, 800, but you could trade in any phone. Like even broken ones and bring the price down to 1, 500.

And so that is it's not the true retail price, but at least it's a little bit more affordable, approachable, because at this point, you know, most people are not most people, a lot of people might have, you know, an old like buster sitting in a drawer somewhere that they can get rid of and then. Hey, that's a free 300 discount.

What's the magic price you think for the bigger foldables? if getting under 1, 500, I feel like like 1, 500 retail price. And then if you have incentives on that, and maybe the incentives aren't quite as steep as what's available because there are some, a fair amount of pre order bonuses that Samsung and Google are doing for their foldables, but you got to get like the base retail price, at least down to 1, 500 before.

There's going to be any sort of like major traction.

Devindra: Do you ever think this is going to be like a major category for smartphones or will it always just be the elites, the super, like the people who have more money to spend because functionally it gets you a tablet and a phone, which is nice, but that premium is rough, especially when you could get a typical smartphone plus a separate tablet that has separate battery, you know, like you have to worry less about your main device losing charge throughout the day.

For a lot of people, I feel like that's still the better option and probably will be for a very long time. Do you, I don't know, you've been using this, could you live without a big foldable at this point, Sam?

Sam: I would have a hard time switching away permanently because I'm sort of on the opposite end.

I like the fact that a foldable combines a smartphone and a tablet into one device, which means there's one less device that I need to worry about keeping charged up, keeping updated, whatever. and then but in terms of like overall, like future market share, I kind of equate this to like how you have convertible cars, right?

Convertible cars are never going to be the mainstream car. You know, you're always going to have your hard tops and your, you know, regular coupes with, you know, glass roofs or whatever for a certain section of the market that really loves convertibles. I think it's just kind of the same situation for smartphone people, where there's going to be a certain section who really love that flexibility or offer a car

Devindra: is something more, more than the mainstream, I

Sam: guess.

And maybe if it's only five or 10 percent of the market, I think that's okay. but we're gonna, yeah, we're still kind of in that kind of finding out period.

Devindra: Yeah, definitely. everyone's asking, I see in the chat, people are being like, well, at least Google has, you know, foldable where's Apple in all this.

Do you think Apple even cares about the idea of a foldable smartphone or. To me, the rumors of the foldable iPad mini, because the iPad mini is this really interesting device right now where it's expensive, but still pretty powerful, as powerful as the iPad air basically, and not a huge price difference.

So I almost wonder if Apple's well, if we push that, forget about the mini. What if we had a thing that costs the same as the iPad air, but it folded in half to be smaller when you need it to, I feel like functionally that's what Apple would lean on rather than the smartphone itself. But what's your thinking?

Sam: Yeah. I mean, there's been rumors about Apple has been working on, you know, at least been testing it in the background of what a foldable iPhone would look like, and I think, you know, there's maybe a chance we see that probably not next year, maybe 2026. but you know, Apple with most things is really so hesitant that they want to make sure that it's like.

Quote unquote, perfect. Nothing's ever perfect, but it's, you know, it has that Apple polish on it before it gets released to the world.

Devindra: It's not perfect, but better than everybody else, which is what I think, like even the vision pro, like for all of its fault, it is a better headset than so many others. Like they have solved a lot of like functional issues.

So no, I don't know anything special. I see people in the chat saying, I don't know anything special about Apple's plans. But I do look at the iPad mini. I'm like, that is a really interesting device. And I just can't justify the cost. And also I think I would want a bigger screen most of the time, but what if that mini could be folded in half?

What if that mini had GPS, you know, had cellular access to what if you just didn't call it a phone, but maybe some people would buy it and actually end up using it as a big phone, I don't know. I could see that being a thing Apple would try to pursue, but then it wouldn't be the same price. I'm sure the mini will still stick around, but that thing would be, how do you get the iPad mini to cost, 1, 500 to turn it into a foldable, I guess.

Yeah, yeah.

Sam: I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Apple goes the other way and they come out with a flip style foldable first, and they don't even do a z fold competitor. just because I think It would kind of fit in with Apple's design chops and they, you know, they would be able to kind of flex on, it was like, Hey, we made this really cool pocket friendly thing that you can just throw around and it's super compact and cute.

And I think Apple hasn't had a cute phone in a while. The, the SE is they've kind of languished. And so I think, you know, going back to the, you know, remember the colorful iPhone five C like people love that thing. And so maybe this could be like a modern kind of replacement to that.

Devindra: I think the latest German rumors with the, is the next SC will probably be more like it will have the home button and everything.

Like it'll be a little more modern. So maybe that'll be a thing, but yeah, now that you bring it up, Sam, I do think an Apple flip style foldable could be good, but we've also seen the rumors of Apple also wants to be like, let's go impossibly thin, like they did with the, the latest iPad pros. If you combine the impossibly thin.

That could also fold like I feel like that's that would be the mind blowing part for a lot of people You

Sam: know like it like we we've seen that you know flip style foldables are getting really thin you know 4. 2 4. 3 millimeters and so Hey, maybe, maybe there's some truth into you know, a combination of those, those rumors, but who knows?

Devindra: Yeah, cool. Well, anything else you want to mention about the Galaxy Pro The Galaxy, not the Galaxy, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. Anything else you want to mention about this or Google's event, Sam?

Sam: Yeah, I think the kind of the last kind of follow up is that Like you said before, Google moved its, you know, annual fall lunch up to August, but if we look at the actual rollouts of the various devices, we can see that, it almost is like they weren't fully committed to that because, you know, to kind of explain that why we don't have devices in hand yet is that.

the Pixel 9 family, Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL. Those are officially on sale on August 22nd. So coming up pretty soon. However, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold isn't going to be available until September 4th. Then the Pixel Watch 3, which is now available in two sizes. Finally, thank goodness. is coming out September 10th and then September 10th is right around when Apple normally has their big, you know, annual iPhone event.

And then all the way in September 26, we get the pixel buds pro two. And so this staggered launch thing is if you're going to have the event this early, you should have all the events ready to go right

Devindra: after the

Sam: event.

Devindra: It's so it's, it feels like it's all it's all FUD against Apple, right?

You have the event early. You then trickle out the devices. So people are, Oh yeah, we're totally thinking about Google and not whatever Apple's cooking next. And that may be a little presumptuous. remember when somebody found a, an early, what was it? An early pixel phone in a bar, like almost replicating the iPhone thing and nobody cared.

Devindra: I think that was the like testament to like how excited people are for pixel Hardaware in general. So that's just funny. Anything else you want to mention about the other devices? Like we got the pixel watch three, any of the AI features?

Sam: I think one really positive thing for the pixel watch three is that Google is moving more features out of the Fitbit subscription that you need to get like You know, daily readiness scores and, fitness metrics and some of the coaching and like personal, you know, they're really leaning into the running and training aspect, especially kind of like, you know, planning your routes and stuff like that.

And so this is something that like, I'm sure Lynn has definitely been on that bandwagon about You need to provide all the features that Apple and Samsung offer without the Fitbit subscription. And then if you want to have you know, really specialized coaching or stuff like that, that's what the Fitbit subscription is for.

But all the base like health metrics and you know, the new loss of pulse feature, which is You know, can, is a really good emergency service. You got to have that baseline. And then if you want to have subscription, you have to make that subscription really compelling, but without kind of cannibalizing the, you know, standard feature set of the device, but like I said, really happy to see the pixel watch three, get a new 45 millimeter version.

I think I've been in, you know, especially if you want, you know, people, larger people, men primarily, I think to get on board with that design, you just kind of need to offer a bigger version. and then quickly on the pixel buds pro two. I was so happy to see them decrease the size. They're I think about 20 percent smaller and lighter than the previous Pixel Buds Pro versus, you know, if you go back and look at what Samsung did to the Galaxy Buds, three line, they just kind of got rid of like the small compactness and went for more of a, you know, AirPods design with the big stem.

And so I'm really happy to see at least Google kind of double down on the Hey, we want it to be super light, super comfortable and not very obtrusive. So at least we have one of the big earbud manufacturers kind of sticking to that mantra. so I'm very happy to see that.

Devindra: I will say this about the pixel watch three.

It looks really cool. Like it looks very sleek. This does seem like the year where Google is like out there pumping sleek, modern looking Hardaware. I almost, I kind of sort of wish like I had an option of a smartwatch like that for iPhone. I'll probably I have a Apple watch series four, so I'll probably upgrade into whatever they do this year, but around the round design can look good, it looks, it can look good.

And I don't mind sacrificing a bit of screen space for that stuff. So anyway, we will be looking at all these devices soon. Keep an eye out for more coverage on our reviews over the next few weeks. Let's move on to some other news and. You know what? Something similarly related to Google, by the way, is Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, had a talk at Stanford where he said a lot of things.

I don't think people really wanted to publicize, or at least he didn't want to publicize. There was a chat at Stanford. The video that has been pulled down right now, but all the news reports about it is out there. he basically, he essentially blamed remote work Google's lagging behind on AI compared to other companies.

So. Okay. You're like, yeah, people aren't grinding enough to him. also the really, the really gross thing where he was basically like, AI startups can totally just steal IP. Does matter when you're successful, you can hire lawyers to just clean up that mess. really just saying the quiet part out loud.

I think that a lot of people assume about AI. Give me any thoughts on this, Sam. I'm not going to give him credit for this because

Sam: to blame you, like your lunch getting eaten by chat GPT on work from home.

Devindra: Yeah. It's

Sam: come on now.

Devindra: that was a deliberate choice because Google held it back because they felt it wasn't productized from all the reporting we've seen.

And then we

Sam: had that whole situation where Bard came out and then I was like, Oh, wait, Bard's not quite there yet. And then they kind of pulled back on that. And then Gemini showed up a little bit after and it's do not, you cannot blame this on work from home. This was, if anything, this was people at the top, not prioritizing or not having the correct vision on seeing where AI technology was Was going, which just feels really weird for Google because of, you know, how much time they've invested into the Google assistant and, you know, they've been crowing about AI for longer than pretty much any company out there.

And to blame that on the workers and work from home just seems kind of tone deaf to me.

Devindra: Just absolutely. I've never liked Eric Schmidt as a businessman. Like he was sort of like just the adult in a room for Google for the longest time, when, you know, posts Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But still this is how a lot of the business people think, right?

Like they, they will be the sharks about this, IP, who cares? A little legal issues. We will deal with that when we have billions of dollars. So just funny to see somebody say it out loud. And then immediately his response was he asked Stanford to take down the video and he's saying, he misspoke. He's saying, yeah, he, he did not actually mean the things he's saying.

just hilarious stuff. Don't trust the businessman. Don't trust the rich folks. Similarly related to this too. there are reports that because of, the whole Google monopoly ruling, US judge ruled that Google is officially a search monopoly. there are reports that the US government could force Google to break up.

And we don't know what that means yet, but it could mean, Hey, maybe Chrome. Becomes a separate company. Maybe Android becomes a separate company. This has been done before. the whole AT& T breakup from Ma Bell to all several different subsidiaries.

Sam: And this is similar to what Microsoft was facing as well.

And it didn't ultimately happen, but even the threat of breaking up the company, if you go and read the Past, you know, or go, go look at documentaries on bill Gates. They said that when that ruling came down and they didn't weren't forced to break up, but they had to have regulators come in and read all their emails.

It really, you know, took a lot of the wind out of Microsoft sales at that point in the company's development. And so it's right, you know, to be clear, the GOJ is, they're just mulling this. They have not even proposed this. They have not, you know, put in any legal filings. It's just something they're considering the, the issue.

The core issue to me is that for Google, the big thing is search, right? They kind of have a monopoly on search. But the thing is, is that it's not because there's, you know, they're hurting competition. People just don't want to use Bing. And, you know, there are other competitors like DuckDuckGo and whatnot, but it's you know, it's hard to say that like Google's Android business or Google's Hardaware business is thriving because of search, and so that seems like a very interesting, kind of dilemma.

Devindra: Android device does make money for Google because they all have Google search by default, right? that's. Google, they're all vessels for Google ads, and I

Sam: believe there was a story that recently came out. It is you know, what could Microsoft do for Apple to make them put being as the default search thing?

And Apple was just like, Nope, no, no amount of money would, would like, cause us to do this. So I think that statement right there, it's like, it's not Google. and then it's just breaking up the company is say you break out the Android business and then you, or you break out the Hardaware business.

I know that like Apple doesn't have their own, you know, search alternative, but it seems really weird to me that especially in the U. S. where Apple has a lead in market share on, you know, On iOS, and smartphones in general that you're going to have to force Google to break up when Apple has a lot of the similar issues, just

Devindra: maybe not related to search.

Well, they're not, not like monopoly dominance is the thing. Like that's, that's where it really, where it comes down to. We're definitely gonna be talking to like legal experts about this particular story, especially as like we can, we hear more. The thing about what the US government is saying is that Google search, yes, it is, it may be technically the best search.

It may be the one people go to, but by paying competitors to make Google the default, it also just kills any, it basically kills a tadpole or kills like a competitor before they can even, even break out and be really useful because there's just no chance of anybody really getting market share. So it's sort of like market, Market share manipulation almost.

I think that's what they're really railing against. And the thing about Microsoft is that, you know, way back in the nineties, the Microsoft antitrust stuff was about Internet Explorer being a part of windows and people being forced to choose Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer was not like dominating the browser market back then.

It was still like mostly Netscape for a while. It was just that Internet Explorer was like rising very quickly. And. The thing about Google is you can look and see Oh no, like Google owns search, nobody else wants to use anything, but Google search being search is still a joke, even with chat GPT.

Like there, there are alternatives. You could pay for a slightly better search engine, but Google is just such a dominating force that nobody can really compete. I guess the question is like, what will you do to help? What can you do to help? Yeah. I mean, if you

Sam: want to put in a law to ban Google from paying other companies to use their search.

I'm, I'm okay with that and it's not like even on iPhone, you can choose a different search provider if you want, but no one does, for a good reason. Yeah.

Devindra: So I don't know. It's a, it's a messy situation. It's also going to be the legal arguments going to be like, people love Google. Google is the best search engine.

What's the problem? And I think a lot of that is a little specious because it's yeah, well, yes, you are the best. You're not, you're not fully

Sam: addressing the issue.

Devindra: Exactly.

Sam: Right.

Devindra: Exactly. Also in other news, scary news that hackers may have leaked the social security numbers of every single American.

basically according to bleeping computer, there's a data dump of 2. 7 billion records of personal info for people in the U S that includes names through social security numbers, aliases, and physical addressive, that people are known to have lived at. From what I've seen, like some people have confirmed, like it does have their information.

you, there was no, you can't go to, have I been pwned to be, to look up this database yet? Cause it's not that fully open. some people have said that the social security numbers in the databases are incorrect. In terms of who they're linking to, but still there's a lot of data out there. so I would say, go check out our posts on this whole thing.

There's a lot of, tips on what you could do if you're worried about this data being out there. Check your credit reports. That's a big thing. there are multiple services that can clean up your information. is it delete me? There are a bunch that can clean up your information online. You have to pay for it, but if you're worried and you start to notice weird stuff, It may be worth it and watch your passwords.

Everybody like use the password manager. We've got a guide on that.

Sam: I was going to say this sort of reminds me, like how back in the two thousands, everyone was like, everybody has to have an antivirus software. And so it was kind of an extra tax that you had to just deal with to exist on their internet and make yourself a little bit safer.

And now security breaches have become so commonplace that it feels like you're almost required just as a human to have some sort of You know, service like ID watch guard or delete me or whatever, just constantly monitoring your, you know, credentials or your, you know, credit history and stuff like that, and it really sucks.

and this kind of, you know, tags onto like a bigger issue of, like I said, security breaches are so commonplace. And then now we're getting into the point where there are entire, Hacker protocols where their whole goal is to gather a bunch of leaked data or breaches, and then decrypt it later once quantum computing becomes more available in some, like a lot of the current security practices.

That's a whole other scary

Devindra: thing we have to worry about to like what quantum computing will enable it. Right? And so,

Sam: NIST encryption standard to kind of sidestep this in the future. It's still very early right now, but this is, you know, something that we were going to have to follow, you know, as, as things develop.

Devindra: It's, that's, we, we've talked a bit about quantum computing before, but we, it's we're just getting around to the idea of what an AI system can do and what an NPU does and how that works compared to CPU quantum is just A whole nother level where you can't even, you can't even understand the data that's coming out of it.

It's just, it's just kind of wild. let me see here. Also, Chris Bell at Engadget wrote a really good piece about meta shutting down CrowdTangle. We've reported on this before. That was the research tool that they acquired, I think around 2016, that gave people a lot of data about what was happening on Facebook and all their services.

they killed it. They have offered an alternative service that is not as good. The thing about CrowdTangle is that everybody could have used it. Journalists, academics, researchers, everybody, the data was just out there. There's a new thing that Facebook is doing that, that Meta is doing that people have to apply for.

And from what we've seen, it's just not nearly as good. So check out Chris's report and. Think about this, like when everybody's talking about Mark Zuckerberg's glow up, Oh man, like his hair is kind of, he's trendier. He seems chiller. He's wearing cool necklaces. He's more like a bro rather than a nerd trying to mimic a Roman Emperor, almost more like a human, almost more like a human.

And I can't help but think like how much of a distraction, a lot of that stuff is like, what, what life coaching is he getting to be like, don't worry about the global consequences of your actions from your companies. Just be chill, Mark Zuckerberg. because in the

Sam: timing of this This seems a little bit weird because Zuckerberg himself has been talking about, we want to be more transparent and, you know, be, give people more insight into how meta works.

But then you go and shut this down. Granted, there is a replacement, but like you said, it's not quite as good. So it's That have just kept that thing going.

Devindra: There's a lot of criticism that they're also doing this before, like months before an election, when we really need a good service to help people figure out like where, where is the spam data?

Where is the bad stuff? Where are the bad operators? What's trending on your social network? Just to have this gone at this key moment is ridiculous. So, yeah. And the only data we're going to have stuff coming from whatever the new meta program is now, which people have to apply for. Journalists can't apply for that, by the way.

So only researchers at some institutions, not everybody's getting in. Yeah. Little, little weird. They almost don't want journalists to have all the info. all we have to rely on is the info then that meta is releasing on itself. And that is always a recipe for failure. So check out Chris's report. I think it's worth reading and we're thinking about, and maybe don't give Mark Zuckerberg too much credit for having a cooler hairdo and more style and more human interactions now, because I think a lot of it just means he's not as concerned about the problems from his own companies.

final story for us is that Apple is opening up NFC functionality to third party developers and iOS 18. 1. this was a thing that was going to be coming to the EU, but now it's coming to everybody looks and. People can use it to do tap to pay functions, functions that rely on the secure element, Sam, like you, you're the mobile guy.

What do you think about this? are you excited about more NFC stuff happening on iPhones? I'm more of just it's about time

Sam: because for, if you look at it, this is how Apple grew Apple pay by Apple pay uses NFC, but it was the only app that was allowed to use NFC on the iPhone. And so, you know, we were just talking about monopolistic practices.

It's well, that is right there, a very clear sign. And I don't think it's a coincidence that after the EU was forcing Apple to open it up, in, in Europe that now they're kind of opening it up globally to maybe sign kind of sidestep some scrutiny. Now that like they notice, Oh, DOJ is kind of given a hard look at Google.

Let's kind of get out of the spotlight for a second. So Google can step in and take the

Devindra: hit. I could almost see me more of an Apple secure thing because it's like digital payments is tough. You don't want to have any app getting access to the secure element and everything. So now developers can apply to be a part of it.

There may be additional fees to use the secure element, of course, because it's Apple, but also we took so long to get tap to pay stuff. Like other countries have had pre, I think even pre smartphones, like Japan has had like tap to pay elements for a while. or at least tap NFC sort of like tapping functionality.

It's going to be like a bigger security risk for Apple to do this. But yeah, it's, it's a good thing. I, I love tapping NFC stuff. Like I feel like I'm in the future when I can just tap my phone on something and just pay for groceries. Yeah.

Sam: Yeah. We finally got tapped to pay at the, like in the subway in New York city.

And so it's Oh, Hey, this is kind of nice. That said, you know, I just want to point out some of the sort of similarities is that the security risk is the same kind of argument that Apple used for not opening up the app store to third party, programs. And so it's it is always, there's always you know, a core thing that like Apple can point back to.

It's Oh, we're making ourselves more vulnerable, but at the same time, like it's also kind of a monopolistic practice. And so, you know, how do you, I guess the trick is, you know, how do you In terms of yeah,

Devindra: it kind of goes back to what Schmidt was talking to Eric Schmidt, basically do the thing that may be bad until, you know, somebody yells at you for, and then you deal with the repercussions.

I cannot blame Apple for being like, listen, we built this thing for our products. And this is what we're going to start with. you look at the Android. App store and like what, the Google store is a, is a disaster, like a mess of like really messy software. Not like always polished apps and a lot of malware just floating around the app store.

So it is like a balance that we definitely have to think about. I'm glad people are. Yelling at Apple about this stuff to, also kind of semi related to this. Apple is finally allowing Spotify to display pricing in the EU. Spotify is not going to be direct linking to its website. You still have to go

Sam: to the website on a different device just to, you know, sign up for your subscription.

Devindra: But now at least, at least Spotify can show their pricing in the EU within their app without making Apple mad. So that's, to me, this is the more, this is just petty. You know, this whole thing is so petty. And in terms of Apple also making people pay, if you click through an app link to buy something on a website, Apple will still take a cut because Apple saying Hey, we, we enabled that, you know, our, our platform.

No, I don't know about that. So these are the things I'm more annoyed that Apple does. And when it just seems petty, when it's not really about security, it's just about you, like almost punishing developers for going outside of your ecosystem, I think that's a big problem. But yeah, we'll be following all these stories, folks.

So keep an eye out.

Let's move on to what we're working on. On my end, I've, I'm still like in the process of testing a few new co pilot PCs, and things with AI chip. So there are a bunch of movie reviews up, and it, you know, I reviewed Borderlands, I reviewed the movie I'm going to be talking about soon and also industry season three.

So check out all that coverage on the site. Sam, what are you working on? Borderlands still makes me sad.

Sam: obviously a lot of Google stuff coming, coming up shortly. we're also starting to prep for IFA, which is, you know, the big European consumer tech show. and then recently, I just published a review for the, ACES ROG ally X, which is their kind of big refresh to their handheld gaming PC.

It's really good. It's, you know, you'll go, go read the review, but it's kind of what I wanted the original ally to be from the start. And so I think just real quickly, if you are looking for a handheld gaming PC. Your two choices are the ally X or the steam deck OLED. And so those are the kind of the two different front runners.

there are some rumors out Lenovo might have an answer to that, but not immediately, maybe closer to CES. I would also

Devindra: never hold your breath for Lenovo Hardaware. How about that? Just as a rule. Don't get too excited. See, let's see how that turns out. Anything else, Sam?

Sam: no, I mean, I'm, I should probably say that, I'm gonna be out starting for a few months.

just because, I have a new addition to the family. Yay, congrats! So, I, I'm planning to be on paternity leave for a few months, Obviously depends when the baby actually arrives.

Devindra: Yeah. Yeah. Congrats, Sam. two babies, two kids is, is this is, this is a second one. You, yeah, one is tough. One was tough for us, but two is just okay, you feel like you've got it, but then like new things arise.

So good luck. Enter the chaos zone. Enter the chaos zone. Everybody sends Sam your well wishes and everything. Let's move on to some, some pop culture picks for the week. Sam, what do you want to shout out? There's a new TFT

Sam: set, team fight tactics. This is the game that I've been playing a long time. I play the double up the two person mode with my wife.

We actually recently hit Emerald, which is like the highest we've done in terms of you know, duo gameplay. And then there's all, Riot is also releasing a new experimental PVE mode for TFT, which is like, Seems really weird because the whole, idea of the game is to beat the other people that are in your lobby.

so they, you know, right. It's very, been very clear about this. It's there's this kind of a test. It's very experimental. I'm kind of excited for it and it comes out in a couple of weeks. So if you're into auto battlers, maybe check that out. And then, the last season of Umbrella Academy is finally out.

And so I think it's kind of, kind of, I like it. I've enjoyed it when I watched it. And so I want to, you know, I want to see that series through. So I'll probably be checking that out real soon.

Devindra: Awesome. Yeah. I, I did a like last quick catch up with the boys to watch this season. And I feel like I am so many seasons behind on Umbrella Academy, but I really liked the first season.

So, yeah, good luck with that, Sam. Some things from my end, something good and something terrible. Alien Romulus, I think is fantastic. I have a review up on the site. this is a Fede Alvarez film set between Alien 1 and Aliens. And it has the like cool retro tech and style of the original films. it feels like very much an old school alien movie.

I've seen criticisms that it's trading too much on nostalgia bait and like it's doing things we've seen before. And that's also true, but I think it's also really well made. I like Fede Alvarez as a, as a director, like he has a good eye. He can construct set pieces really well. And this is basically a setup for like maybe films that feel more traditionally alien, not something like Prometheus or Alien Covenant, which were just like weird philosophical discourses by, by Ridley Scott.

Basically, these are just like proper tight. This one is a proper tight, like alien horror film. Kaylee Spaney, who's been in a bunch of movies this year, is fantastic. David Johnson, who I love, who is in industry, he's also great in this. So I think it's fantastic. See it on the biggest screen you can.

I freaking loved it. And the movie I did not love is Borderlands, which I also reviewed on Engadget and is one of the worst movies I've seen this past decade. It's just really bad. It's just a complete disaster. And I kind of felt that from the trailer. maybe catch it at home if you want to hate watch something, but good God.

I don't think Eli Roth can make good movies. I think that's where I come down. Don't spend a lot of money going to see this, whatever. Don't spend any money. Like maybe buy a ticket for a better movie and sneak into Borderlands. If you really want to see Borderlands, maybe that, maybe that's the thing.

I'm so sad because I think the look

Sam: of the movie was like,

Devindra: It seems like it

Sam: was interesting, but then everything else kind of, they dropped the ball. I mean,

Devindra: it's not even because Borderlands, the look of Borderlands, the games is like cool cel shaded stuff and the idea was always sort of like Mad Max y vibes.

the movie's trying to be both Mad Max and something else. Something else similar to Mad Max. What's in metal? Twisted Metal, maybe. Oh no, Mad Max meets Guardians of the Galaxy. That is kind of what the movie is going for with the ragtag group of anti heroes and whatnot. It's not good. Badly written. One of the screenwriters took their name off of it because they didn't want to be fully embarrassed by this thing, so.

Yeah, it's a complete disaster, and I hate it. I

Sam: should also mention, I'm getting very worried about the upcoming Transformers 1 animated movie. I've heard good

Devindra: things

Sam: about that. I hope you're right, because it looks like It looks silly. It looks like This looks like the Transformers people are trying to make a Marvel movie and that including the casting.

And I'm not very excited about that as a longtime Transformers fan, but it's also like reserve judgment. Yeah,

Devindra: it is also a prequel set on, their robot planet, but also where Optimus and Megatron were friends.

Sam: I mean, so that actually, yeah, that was a thing going back to the original, not necessarily friends, but they have a long history.

I'm aware of a long history, but not like bros, you know? Yeah, it's like almost touching on like the whole buddy cop thing and then like they, you know, start betraying each other and stuff. Like you guys got to do better.

Devindra: I've heard good things. That movie also has a good director. So yeah, hope to be checking it out.

Sam, if you're, I don't know if you're around, maybe you can help us review that one. Okay. Cause it sounds like you're into transformers. Anyway, that's what we've been watching. That's the episode for this week, folks. As always, our theme music is by game composer, Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien.

Podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find me online and at Devindra on Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, all the fun places. Where can we find you, Sam? Find me at Sam Rutherford, on X and then as always on Engadget. com. Awesome. Email us at podcasts at Engadget. com. Leave us a review on iTunes and subscribe on anything that gets podcasts.

And be sure to check out the other episodes we dropped this week. we had, the post Google event chat with me and Sherlynn, and I also talked with some AMD executives about their thoughts on AIPC. So don't miss that. Thanks folks. We're out.

IMAGES

How Mark Zuckerberg Thinks
The Zuck’s Way of Thinking : Rahasia Sukses Berpikir dan Bertindak
Best 25 Mark Zuckerberg Quotes on Leadership and Success
The Unbreakable Genius Of Mark Zuckerberg
What's Mark Zuckerberg's IQ? Exploring The Mind Of A Billionaire
Struggling to Take a Critical Decision

COMMENTS

Mark Zuckerberg Explains His Hiring Strategy
Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of critical thinking in an interview with Bloomberg. Zuckerberg said his hiring strategy follows the same line of thought. The CEO has also said he wouldn ...
Speech Analysis Suggests Mark Zuckerberg Is Smarter Than Elon Musk
Speech Analysis Suggests Mark Zuckerberg Is Smarter Than Elon Musk. ... critical thinking (the quality of argument formation, its deconstruction, and thorough analysis), and contextual relevance ...
How Mark Zuckerberg Thinks
How Mark Zuckerberg Thinks: Rosalene Glickman, Ph.D., Optimal Thinking expert analyzes the thinking of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Inc. (424) 204-6133. ... Keep in mind, this analysis provides a snapshot of Mark Zuckerberg's thinking process in one specific context. How Mark Zuckerberg Uses Optimal Thinking.
The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Mark Zuckerberg on Long-Term Strategy
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Mark Zuckerberg (FB/IG), the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004.Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing ...
Leadership Qualities
Here're some leadership skills of Mark Zuckerberg. Critical thinker: Mark always tends to thinks deeply. He likes to have a clear idea, no matter how small a fact is. He believes his more profound thought and understanding helps him to know what's right or wrong. He better accepts the second or third best idea after a clear understanding ...
Mark Zuckerberg Leadership Style & Principles
Mark Zuckerberg is probably one of the most beloved leaders in the business world. Leadership is the quality that will bring the best out of the people around you. ... Critical thinking enables leaders to understand the impact of their decisions on the business as a whole and ensures both alignment with organizational goals and accountability ...
Mark Zuckerberg hires people who do 'one thing really well'
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins a growing number of executives suggesting that a specific field of study is less critical for employment in today's competitive job market. What matters most, he ...
7 Life Skills We Can Learn From Mark Zuckerberg
Critical thinking. Zuckerberg has noted his interest in always going deeper with an issue or idea in order to really make a difference, be disruptive and maximize the value. As he once said, "I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then ...
Seven Life Skills I Learned From Mark Zuckerberg About Success
Critical thinking. Zuckerberg has noted his interest in always going deeper with an issue or idea in order to really make a difference, be disruptive and maximize the value. As he once said , "I ...
Extra: Mark Zuckerberg Full Interview
What follows is Stephen Dubner 's conversation with Facebook founder and C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series " The Secret Life of a C.E.O. " It was recorded last summer, long before we learned that 50 million Facebook users' data had been weaponized by political operatives. Facebook has been the subject of ...
Meta: What Exactly Is Mark Zuckerberg Thinking?
A quick review of Zuckerberg's public presentations almost always includes the phrase "metaverse," underscoring the significance of how the Facebook (now Meta) CEO views it. While not ...
Mark Zuckerberg: Most future jobs will be more 'creative' than
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts that future technology will clear the way for more imaginative jobs, especially in tech and computer science.
Mark Zuckerberg Shares Insights on Hiring and Critical Thinking
Conclusion. Mark Zuckerberg's hiring philosophy is a testament to the evolving nature of talent acquisition in the tech industry. By prioritizing learning, critical thinking, and cultural alignment, Zuckerberg has built a framework that emphasizes potential over specific skill sets. This approach is particularly relevant in a rapidly changing ...
Apple's C.E.O. Is Making Very Different Choices From Mark Zuckerberg
Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, tells Kara Swisher that he's "not focused on Facebook" and that privacy evolution is "not aimed at a company, it's aimed at a principle.". In this ...
How to Think Like Zuckerberg
Walter, who is a "social innovator" at Intel, interviewed many employees and Facebook partners to learn more about what it means to think like Zuck. The 5 P's. "Every entrepreneur's vision is ...
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From such thinking came Zuckerberg's realization that three broad themes matter most to Facebook: connectivity (his goal of bringing the Internet—and the wonders of Facebook, of course—to ...
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In summation, Zuckerberg is perceived as a creative person who has made a difference in his life. His creativity is seen in his successful projects, which include Zucknet, CourseMatch, FaceMash and Facebook. Although he faced many obstacles, Zuckerberg demonstrated various traits, including critical thinking, mindfulness, perseverance, and team ...
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Nation Apr 11, 2018 11:17 AM EDT. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened his testimony Tuesday on Capitol Hill with an apology — one that he's repeated often since first acknowledging ...
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The Full Version Of Mark Zuckerberg's Manifesto On Building Global Community. by Terry Heick. Mark Zuckerberg's recent letter to the facebook community (read: everyone), in which he lays out a kind of vision for our collective digital future, is bursting at the seams with ideas worth examining, whether because of their insightfulness or because of the power of the person wielding them.
Mark Zuckerberg Critical Thinking Examples That Really Inspire
Cicero And Zuckerberg On Friendship Critical Thinking Examples. Cicero argued that true friendship cannot be attained without virtue on the part of the persons. He stressed the importance of virtue among people before they can be considered true friends. On the other hand, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg comments that virtue is not a criterion ...
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However, with Zuckerberg's marriage to Priscilla Chan, their subsequent three miscarriages (before the birth of their daughter, Max), his sharing of his and Priscilla's pain in a much ...
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins a growing number of executives suggesting that a specific field of study is less critical for employment in today's competitive job market.
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Has he been thinking too much of the Roman empire? Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg attend the 2020 Breakthrough Prize Red Carpet at NASA Ames Research Center on November 03, 2019 in Mountain ...
Few & Far Co-Founder Sarah Dusek Is Pioneering A Female-First ...
It also set a new standard for eco-friendly travel, immediately drawing the attention of celebrity clients, including Madonna, Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Hilary Swank.
Engadget Podcast: Pixel 9 Pro Fold hands-on thoughts
I think it's worth reading and we're thinking about, and maybe don't give Mark Zuckerberg too much credit for having a cooler hairdo and more style and more human interactions now, because I think ...

Mark Zuckerberg explains his hiring philosophy

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

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

Leadership Qualities of Mark Zuckerberg

Leadership Characteristics and Traits of Mark Zuckerberg

Other traits and characteristics of Mark Zuckerberg are:

Leadership Skills of Mark Zuckerberg

Bottom Line

Mark Zuckerberg Leadership Style & Principles

Mark Zuckerberg Leadership Style & Principles

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

Think Different

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

Zuck's said

📚 Additional reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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Episode 328

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Episode Transcript

Mark Zuckerberg Shares Insights on Hiring and Critical Thinking

Learning How to Learn: A Lifelong Skill

Hiring for Cultural Fit and Leadership Potential

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